Galuppi: Concerti A Quattro, Trio Sonata in G Major

Baldassare Galuppi, Concerti A Quattro liner notes

"O Galuppi, Baldassara, this is very sad to find! I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind; But although I take your meaning, 'tis with a heavy mind!" So read the first few lines of Browning's poem, ''A Toccata of Galuppi's." A lovely poem indeed, in spite of the poetic license, since, so far as is known, Galuppi never wrote any toccatas. During the first half of the eighteenth century ''sonata" and "toccata" were used more or less interchangeably for many compositions which did not fall within the emerging structure of the former, but were in general more free-flowing and rhapsodic as in the latter. While it would be nice to say that Browning's poem was inspired by a Toccata in D minor of Galuppi, it so happens that there is a manuscript collection of Galuppi's keyboard works in the Brussels Conservatory in which three compositions bear the title of ''Toccata,'' including the D minor Sonata! Not only that, but the other two compositions in the collection fit, in a general sense, the mood of Browning's poem. Each of these three works, called "Toccata" in the manuscript collection, were originally called "Sonata" by the composer. It is vaguely possible that the poet stumbled on a rare edition of these sonata-toccatas and his imagination took it from there. It is also possible that Browning's inspiration was derived from other composi­tions, which would, of course, broaden the question considerably. Inquiries as to the source of the poem may very well be almost as old as the poem itself, since, in the ''Galuppi" article in the 1906 edition of Grove's Dictionary, the writer declared that "no particular composition was taken as the basis of the poem.'' In the light of present-day research and scholarship this must still be the only answer.