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Updated: June 26, 2025
His schooling was short and desultory, his education being attended to by private tutors and by his father, who left the boy largely to follow his own inclination. Like the young Milton, Browning was fond of music, and in many of his poems, especially in "Abt Vogler" and "A Toccata of Galuppi's," he interprets the musical temperament better, perhaps, than any other writer in our literature.
The old master, Vogler, and the dearer friend, Von Weber, still encouraged the young composer with their approbation, and only blamed a stupid audience that would not discern the beauties appreciable by their sharper ears. Meyerbeer had good sense, and with a modesty perhaps more unusual in a musician than in any one else, he was disposed rather to blame himself than the public.
He despises the greatest masters. As I had composed the same opera in Milan, I was anxious to see it, and hearing from Holzbauer that Vogler had it, I asked him to lend it to me. "With all my heart," said he; "I will send it to you to-morrow without fail, but you won't find much talent in it."
In 1811 a still greater excitement disturbed the serenity of Meyerbeer's period of study. Vogler closed his school, and started with his scholars on a tour through the principal cities of Germany.
At fifteen he became the pupil of Vogler in Darmstadt, with whom he displayed such talent in composition that he was named Composer to the Court by the Grand Duke. At eighteen his first dramatic work, "The Daughter of Jephtha," was performed at Munich. He then began the world for himself, and made his début in Vienna as a pianist with great success.
"Your Highness, he has talent; and by degrees, when he is older and more solid, he will no doubt improve, though he must first change considerably." When Vogler came back he entered the Church, was immediately appointed Court Chaplain, and composed a Miserere which all the world declares to be detestable, being full of false harmony.
Most of his best monologues are to be found in the volumes known as Dramatic Lyrics , Dramatic Romances and Lyrics , Men and Women , Dramatis Personae . My Last Duchess, Andrea del Sarto, Saul, Abt Vogler, and The Last Ride Together are a few of his strong representative monologues. The speaker in My Last Duchess is the widowed duke, who is describing the portrait of his lost wife.
'Abt Vogler' is the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language. It is not the theories of the poet, but the instincts of the musician, that it speaks.
His verse often swells and falls with a wavelike rhythm as in Saul or in these lines in Abt Vogler: "There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arc; in the heaven, a perfect round."
As he sits in the twilight, holding his wife's hand, and talking in a half-musing way, it is readily seen that his love for this beautiful but soulless woman has caused many of his failures and sorrows in the past, and will continue to arouse conflicts of soul in the future. Abt Vogler, one of Browning's noblest and most melodious poems, voices the exquisite raptures of a musician's soul:
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