Abt Vogler

[ The Man. ] ( Dram at is 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 bitterne . Having thus failed in his own country, he went to Paris, and in 1783 brought out his comic opera, La Kerme e . It was so great a failure that it was not po ible 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 succe 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 succe ful: 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 E lingen 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 Meyer beer, 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 harne , 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 completene impre es 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 prince , 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 a erted 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 pa ed 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; Maim on ides, 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 A quinas ( 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 goodne which brighten our path here suggest a Sun of Righteousne 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 that he has been permitted to have part and lot with such high matters, he can solemnly acquiesce in the common round and daily task. He feels for the common chord, descends the mount, gliding by semitones, glancing back at the heights he is leaving, till at last, finding his true resting-place in the C Major of this life, soothed and sweetly lulled by the heavenly harmonies, he falls asleep. The Esoteric system of the Cabbalah was largely the outcome of Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, and from these have sprung the theosophy of Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme. It is certain that Mr. Browning was a student of the latter “theosophist” par excellence . In his poem Transcendentalism he refers to the philosopher by name, and there are evidences that the poet’s mind was deeply tinctured with his ideas. The influence of Para cels us on Boehme’s mind is conspicuous in his works, and the sympathy with that great medical reformer which the poem of Para cels us betrays on every page was no doubt largely due to Boehme’s teaching. The curious blending of theosophy and science which is found in the poem of Para cels us is not a le faithful picture of Mr. Browning’s philosophical system than of that of his hero. Profe or Andrew Seth, in the article on theosophy in the Encyclopædia Britannica , thus expounds Boehme’s speculation on evil: it turns “upon the nece ity of reconciling the existence and the might of evil with the existence of an all-embracing and all-powerful God.... He faces the difficulty boldly—he insists on the nece ity of the Nay to the Yea, of the negative to the positive.” Eckhart seems to have largely influenced Boehme. We have in this poem what has been aptly called “the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language.” (Symons.) Mr. Browning was a thorough musician himself, and no poet ever wrote what the musician felt till he penned the wonderful music-poems Abt Vogler , Master Hugues of Saxe Gotha and A Toccata of Galuppi’s . The comparison between music and architecture is as old as it is beautiful. Amphion built the walls of Thebes to the sound of his lyre—fitting the stones together by the power of his music, and “Ilion’s towers,” they say, “rose with life to Apollo’s song.” The “Keeley Motor” was an attempt in this direction. Cole ridge, too, in Kubla Khan , with “music loud and long would build that dome in air.” In the May 1891 number of the Century Magazine there is a very curious and a very interesting account by Mrs. Watts Hughes of certain “Voice-figures” which have lately excited so much interest in scientific and musical circles. “By a simple method figures of sounds are produced which remain permanent. On a thin india rubber membrane, stretched acro the bottom of a tube of sufficient diameter for the purpose, is poured a small quantity of water or some denser liquid, such as glycerine; and into this liquid are sprinkled a few grains of some ordinary solid pigment. A note of music is then sung down the tube by Mrs. Watts Hughes, and immediately the atoms of suspended pigment arrange themselves in a definite form, many of the forms bearing a curious resemblance to some of the most beautiful objects in Nature—flowers, shells, or trees. After the note has ceased to sound the forms remain, and the pictorial representations given in the Century show how wonderfully accurate is the lovely mimicry of the image-making music.” ( Spectator , May 16th, 1891.) The thought of some soul of permanence behind the transience of music, provided the motive of Adelaide Procter’s Lost Chord . In the Idylls of the King Lord Tennyson says— “The city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built for ever.” Cardinal Newman, too, as the writer in the Spectator points out, expre es the same thought in his Oxford sermon, “The Theory of Development in Christian Doctrine.” The preacher said: “Take another example of an outward and earthly form of economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified—I mean musical sounds, as they are exhibited most perfectly in instrumental harmony. There are seven notes in the scale: make them fourteen; yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great master create his new world! Shall we say that all this exuberant inventivene is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like some fashion of the day, without reality, without meaning?... Is it po ible that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound which is gone and perishes? Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impre ions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is not so! It cannot be.” Notes. — Stanza I. “ Solomon willed. ” Jewish legend gave Solomon sovereignty over the demons and a lordship over the powers of Nature. In the Moslem East these fables have found a resting-place in much of its literature, from the Koran onwards. Solomon was thought to have owed his power over the spiritual world to the po e ion of a seal on which the “most great name of God was engraved” (see Lane, Arabian Nights , Introd., note 21, and chap. i., note 15). In Eastern philosophy, the “Upādana” or the intense desire produces WILL , and it is the will which develops force , and the latter generates matter , or an object having form (see Isis Unveiled , Blavatsky, vol. ii., p. 320). “ Pile him a palace. ” Goethe called architecture “petrified music.” “ The ineffable Name ”: the unspeakable name of God. Jehovah is the European transcription of the sacred tetragrammaton יהוה. The later Jews substituted the word Adonai in reading the ineffable Name in their law and prayers. Mysterious names of the Deity are common in other religions than the Jewish. In the Egyptian Funeral Ritual , and in a hymn of the Soul, the Word and the Name are referred to in connection with hidden secrets. The Jewish enemies of Christ said that the miracles were wrought by the power of the ineffable Name, which had been stolen from the Sanctuary. (See Isis Unveiled , vol. ii, p. 387.)— Stanza III. Rampired : an old form of ramparted. “ The Illumination of Rome’s Dome. ” One of the great sights of Rome used to be the illumination of the dome of St. Peter’s on great festivals, such as that of Easter. Since the occupation of Rome by the Italian Government such spectacles, if not wholly discontinued, have been shorn of most of their splendour.— Stanza IV. “ No more near nor far. ” Hegel says that “Music frees us from the phenomena of time and space,” and shows that they are not e entials, but accidents of our condition here.— Stanza V. “ Protoplast. ” The thing first formed, as a copy to be imitated.— Stanza VII. “ That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. ” “A star is perfect and beautiful, and rays of light come from it.” Stanza XII. “ Common chord. ” A chord consisting of the fundamental tone with its third and fifth. “ Blunt it into a ninth. ” A ninth is ( a ) An interval containing an octave and a second; ( b ) a chord consisting of the common chord, with the eighth advanced one note. “ C Major of this life. ” Mi Helen Ormerod, in a paper read to the Browning Society of London, November 30th, 1888, has explained these musical terms and expre ions. “C Major is what may be called the natural scale, having no sharps or flats in its signature. A Minor, with A (a third below C) for its keynote, has the same signature, but sharps are introduced for the formation of correct intervals. Pauer says that minor keys are chosen for expre ing ‘intense seriousne , soft melancholy, longing, sadne , and pa ionate grief’; whilst major keys with sharps and flats in their signatures are said to have distinctive qualities;—perhaps Browning chose C major for the key, as the one most allied to matters of everyday life, including rest and sleep. The common chord, as it is called, the keynote with its third and fifth, contains the rudiments of all music.”