The Browning Cyclopædia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning. Edward Berdoe
Agamemnon of Æschylus published.
1878. La Saisiaz published. The Two Poets of Croisic published.
1879. Dramatic Idyls published.
1880. Dramatic Idyls (Second Series) published.
1881. The Browning Society inaugurated, Oct. 28th.
1883. Jocoseria published.
1884. Ferishtah’s Fancies published.
1887. Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day published.
1889. Asolando: Fancies and Facts, published. Robert Browning died in Venice, December 12th; buried in Westminster Abbey, December 31st.
BROWNING CYCLOPÆDIA
Abano, a town of Northern Italy, 6 miles S.W. of Padua, the birthplace of Pietro d’Abano (q. v.).
Abate, Paolo (or Paul), brother of Count Guido Franceschini. He was a priest residing in Rome. (Ring and the Book.)
Abbas I., surnamed The Great. See Shah Abbas.
Abd-el-Kader, a celebrated Algerian warrior, born in 1807, who in 1831 led the combined tribes in their attempt to resist the progress of the French in Algeria. He surrendered to the French in 1847, and was set at liberty by Louis Napoleon in 1852. (Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kader.)
Abt Vogler. [The Man.] (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) George Joseph Vogler, usually known as Abbé Vogler, or, as Mr. Browning has called him, Abt Vogler, was an organist and composer, and was born at Würzburg, June 15th, 1749. He was educated for the Church from his very early years, as is the custom with Catholics; but every opportunity was taken to develop his musical talents, which were so marked that at ten years old he could play the organ and the violin well. In 1769 he studied at Bamberg, removing thence in 1771 to Mannheim. In 1773 he was ordained priest in Rome, and was admitted to the famous Academy of Arcadia, was made a Knight of the Golden Spur, and was appointed protonotary and chamberlain to the Pope. He returned to Mannheim in 1775, and opened a School of Music. He published several works on music, composition, and the art of forming the voice. He was made chaplain and Kapellmeister at Mannheim, and about this time composed a Miserere. In 1779 Vogler went to Munich. In 1780 he composed an opera, The Merchant of Smyrna, a ballet, and a melodrama. In 1781 his opera Albert III. was produced at the Court Theatre of Munich. As it was not very favourably received, he resigned his posts of chaplain and choirmaster. He was severely criticised by German musical critics, and Mozart spoke of him with much bitterness. Having thus failed in his own country, he went to Paris, and in 1783 brought out his comic opera, La Kermesse. It was so great a failure that it was not possible to conclude the performance. He then travelled in Spain, Greece, and the East. In 1786 he returned to Europe, and went to Sweden, and was appointed Kapellmeister to the King. At Stockholm he founded his second School of Music, and became famous by his performances on an instrument which he had invented, called the “Orchestrion.” This is described by Mr. G. Grove as a very compact organ, in which four keyboards of five octaves each, and a pedal board of thirty-six keys, with swell complete, were packed into a cube of nine feet. In 1789 Vogler performed without success at Amsterdam. He then went with his organ to London, and gave a series of concerts at the Pantheon in January 1790. These proved eminently successful: Vogler realised over £1200, and made a name as an organist. He seems to have excelled in pedal playing, but it is not true that pedals were unknown in England until the Abbé introduced them. “His most popular pieces,” says the Encyclopædia Britannica, “were a fugue on themes from the ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ composed after a visit to the Handel festival at Westminster Abbey, and on ‘A Musical Picture for the Organ,’ by Knecht, containing the imitation of a storm. In 1790 Vogler returned to Germany, and met with the most brilliant receptions at Coblentz and Frankfort, and at Esslingen was presented with the ‘wine of honour’ reserved usually for royal personages. At Mannheim, in 1791, his opera Castor and Pollux was performed, and became very popular. We find him henceforward travelling all over Europe. At Berlin he performed in 1800, at Vienna in 1804, and at Munich in 1806. Next year we find him at Darmstadt, accepting by the invitation of the Grand Duke Louis I. the post of Kapellmeister. He opened his third school of music at Darmstadt, one of his pupils being Weber, another Meyerbeer, a third Gänsbacher. The affection of these three young students for their master was ‘unbounded.’ He was indefatigable in the pursuit of his art to the last, genial, kind and pleasant to all; he lived for music, and died in harness, of apoplexy, at Darmstadt, May 6th, 1814.”
[The Poem.] The musician has been extemporising on his organ, and as the performance in its beauty and completeness impresses his mind with wonderful and mysterious imagery, he wishes it could be permanent. He has created something, but it has vanished. He compares it to a palace built of sweet sounds, such a structure as angels or demons might have reared for Solomon, a magic building wherein to lodge some loved princess, a palace more beautiful than anything which human architect could plan or power of man construct. His music structure has been real to him, it took shape in his brain, it was his creation: surely, somewhere, somehow, it might be permanent. It was too beautiful, too perfect to be lost. Only the evil perishes, only good is permanent; and this music was so true, so good, so beautiful, it could not be that it was lost, as false, bad, ugly things are lost! But Vogler was but an extemporiser, and such musicians cannot give permanence to their performances. He has reached a state almost of ecstasy, and the spiritual has asserted its power over the material, raising the soul to heaven and bringing down heaven to earth. In the words of Milton, he had become —
“All ear,
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of death,”
and in this heavenly rapture he saw strange presences, the forms of the better to come, or “the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone.” The other arts are inferior to music, they are more human, more material than music, – “here is the finger of God.” And this was all to go – “Never to be again!” This reflection starts the poet on a familiar train of thought – the permanence of good, the impermanence, the nullity of evil. The Cabbalists taught that evil was only the shadow of the Light; Maimonides, Spinoza, Hegel and Emerson taught the doctrine which Mr. Browning here inculcates. Leibnitz speaks of “evil as a mere set-off to the good in the world, which it increases by contrast, and at other times reduces moral to metaphysical evil by giving it a merely negative existence.” “God,” argued Aquinas (Sum. Theol., i., § 49), “created everything that exists, but Sin was nothing; so God was not the Author of it.” So, Augustine and Peter Lombard maintained likewise the negative nature of moral evil: —
“Evil is more frail than nonentity.”
(Proclus, De Prov., in Cory’s Fragm.)
“Let no one therefore say that there are precedaneous productive principles of evil in the nature of intellectual paradigms of evil in the same manner as there are of good, or that there is a malefic soul or an evil-producing cause in the gods, nor let him introduce sedition or eternal war against the First God” (Proclus, Six Books, trans. Thomas Taylor, B. i., c. 27). In heaven, then, we are to find “the perfect round,” “the broken arcs” are all we can discover here. Rising in the tenth stanza to the highest stature of the philosophical truth, the poet proclaims his faith in the existence of a home of pure ideals. The harmony of a few bars of music on earth suggests the eternal harmonies of the Author of order; the rays of goodness which brighten our path here suggest a Sun of Righteousness from which they emanate. The lover and the bard send up to God their feeble aspirations after the beautiful and the true, and these aspirations are stored in His treasury. Failure? It is but the pause in the music, the discords that set off the harmony. To the musician this is not something to be reasoned about mathematically; it is knowledge, it is a revelation which, however informing and consoling while it lasts, must not too long divert a man from the common things of life; patient to bear and suffer because strengthened by the beautiful vision of the Mount of Transfiguration, proud