Abbé (or Abt) Vogler (1749-1814) was a Catholic priest well known a
century ago as an organist and a composer. He founded three schools of
music, one at Mannheim, one at Stockholm, and one at Darmstadt. He was
especially noted for his organ recitals, as many as 7000 tickets having
been sold for a single recital in Amsterdam. In 1798 it was said that he
had then given over a thousand organ concerts. His knowledge of
acoustics and his consequent skill in combining the stops enabled him to
bring much power and variety from organs with fewer pipes than were
generally considered necessary. The remodeling and simplification of
organs was one of his most eagerly pursued activities. He not only
rearranged the pipes, but he introduced free reeds. Through some
skillful Swedish organ-builders he was at last enabled to have an organ
small enough to be portable and constructed according to his ideas. This
he called an "orchestrion." Of Vogler's power as an organist Rinck says,
"His organ playing was grand, effective in the utmost degree." It was,
however, when he was improvising that his power was most astonishing.
Once at a musical soirée Vogler and Beethoven extemporized alternately,
each giving the other a theme, and Gansbacher records the pitch of
enthusiasm to which he was roused by Vogler's masterly playing. Three of
Voglers most famous pupils at Darmstadt were Meyerbeer, Gansbacher, and
Carl Maria von Weber. The last of these gives an attractive picture of
the musician extemporizing in the old church at Darmstadt. "Never," says
Weber, "did Vogler in his extemporization drink more deeply at the
source of all beauty, than when before his three dear boys, as he liked
to call us, he drew from the organ angelic voices and word of thunder."
Browning's poem records the experiences of the musician in one of these
moods of rapturous creation.
The argument of the poem is thus given by Mr. Stopford Brooke in _The
Poetry of Robert Browning_, page 149:
"When Solomon pronounced the Name of God, all the spirits, good and bad,
assembled to do His will and build His palace. And when I, Abt Vogler,
touched the keys, I called the Spirits of Sound to me, and they have
built my palace of music; and to inhabit it all the Great Dead came back
till in the vision I made a perfect music. Nay, for a moment, I touched
in it the infinite perfection; but now it is gone; I cannot bring it
back. Had I painted it, had I written it, I might have explained it. But
in music out of the sounds something emerges which is above the sounds,
and that ineffable thing I touched and lost. I took the well-known
sounds of earth, and out of them came a fourth sound, nay not a
sound--but a star. This was a flash of God's will which opened the
Eternal to me for a moment; and I shall find it again in the eternal
life. Therefore, from the achievement of earth and the failure of it, I
turn to God, and in Him I see that every image, thought, impulse, and
dream of knowledge or beauty--which, coming whence we know not, flit
before us in human life, breathe for a moment, and then depart; which,
like my music, build a sudden palace in imagination; which abide for an
instant and dissolve, but which memory and hope retain as a ground of
aspiration--are not lost to us though they seem to die in their
immediate passage. Their music has its home in the Will of God and we
shall find them completed there."
3. _Solomon._ In Jewish legend it is said that Solomon had power over
angels and demons through a seal on which "the most great name of God
was engraved."
13. _And one would bury his brow._ This description of the foundations
of the palace is not unlike Milton's account of the work of the fallen
angels in building the palace in hell. (_Paradise Lost_, I, 170.) That
"fabric huge" was as magical in its construction as the palace of Abt
Vogler, for, though it was not built by music, it
"Rose like an exhalation with the sound
Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet."