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Art, Artist, and Audience in “A Toccata of Galuppi's”

Robert Browning's music poem “A Toccata of Galuppi's” is built on a system of telescoping viewpoints that might best be diagrammed as concentric circles with Galuppi's music at the core. The speaker of this monologue, a type of smug nineteenth-century Englishman with a deep interest in science, uses the occasion of Galuppi's clavichord touch-piece to muse on possible reactions of the composer's eighteenth-century Venetian audience. As he does so, the speaker becomes something of an artist or creator himself, using his own imagination to recreate an evening at an eighteenth-century Venetian ball; but the speaker also is a critic, himself responding to and interpreting not only Galuppi's music but also the Venetians in their imagined responses to the music. In this best of all Browning's music poems, he has given us something of an analogue of his own method as artist and moralist, as well as an ironic understanding of the efficacy of art and its ongoing treatment by critical audiences.