Browning and Music

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 771, 30 April 1954, Page 10

Browning and Music

SUGGEST a medal for the NZBS officer who filled the interval at Solomon’s piano recital on April 10 with three poems by Browning. The second, "A Toccata of Galuppi’s," a "must" for any anthology of the treatment) of music in poetry, was linked in subject to the occasion, and, admirably read, how delightful it was to hear! It has been a favourite of mine all my long Browning life, and I have always carried snatches of it in my head, but this was the first time I had heard it read, and the art of a great player had put me in a particularly receptive mood. I was struck afresh by the poem’s extraordinary qualities-the mixture of gaiety and doom in the capture of a past society, the mastery of metre and rhyme, the skill with which technical musical terms were woven into the tapestry of the picture, and the lucidity, I refreshed my memory of what Chesterton says of Browning and music, that he may not have known enough about the organ to be more than a sixth-rate organist, but there are some things that a sixth-rate organist knows which a first-rate judge of music does not know, and these were the things that Browning knew. Some of them appear in "A Toccata of Galuppi’s." Then, over the air, on the evening of an April autumn, we listened to that so oft-quoted and sometimes laughedover song of April spring’in England"Home Thoughts from Abroad." Neither the long friction of the poem nor the opposition of the seasons affected its beauty. It has the power to move those who have never seen an English spring. I thought again of the reaction that has come upon Browning as upon other Victorians, and comforted myself with the joy this recital had brought me. I remember the recent reference of an English critic to what he called Browning's "bounce." If this was bounce, on with the game of ball! At any rate, it is better to bounce than to crawl.

A.

M.