TOVEY, SIR DONALD FRANCIS
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Sir Donald Tovey
by Peter R. Shore
Sir Donald Francis Tovey, the Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University from 1914 until his death in 1940, is best remembered as the author of a series of Essays in Musical Analysis.But Tovey regarded himself first and foremost as a musician: making music was the real business of his life; everything else was secondary. Yet he was not content to be a pianist, conductor and composer; as an editor, writer, broadcaster, scholar and teacher, his aim was to bring his knowledge and love of music to a much wider audience.
Born on 17 July 1875 at Eton, Tovey was the younger son of the Reverend Duncan Crookes Tovey and his wife, Mary. At the time of Donald’s birth his father was assistant master of classics at Eton College but he eventually became rector of the parish of Worplesdon in Surrey, a little to the north of Guildford. Neither of his parents was musical, but their elder as well as their younger son had, to different degrees, a gift for music. The extent of Tovey’s musicality was recognised not by his family but by a Miss Sophie Weiss, a piano-teacher and general musical educator who ran ‘Northlands’, a fashionable school at Englefield Green, near Windsor, and who took him as a pupil when he was five. She became his ‘musical mother’, and their association was to last for the rest of his life, with Miss Weisse acting first as tutor and then mentor – a relationship which was to prove both a blessing and a curse. Although the Reverend Tovey was a master at Eton College, Miss Weisse succeeded in preventing the young Donald from going to public school at all. When his father became rector of Worplesdon he received private tuition from Miss Weisse, obtaining from one source or another the substance of a proper school education, as well as first-rate pianoforte training from Miss Weisse herself. His education was completed with an undergraduate career at Balliol College, Oxford, on a scholarship designed to give promising musicians advanced training in the history of philosophy and the literature of ancient Greece, particularly the works of Plato, a course known as the Literae Humaniores or ‘Greats’. Tovey was awarded a third-class degree after a compromise between the historians among the examiners who wanted to give him a fourth-class ranking and the philosophers who considered him a clear first-class candidate.
Miss Weisse had many contacts with wealthy and fashionable members of society in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign, which helped to enhance Tovey’s career as a pianist and composer. She also financed the publication of the Piano Concerto (which is dedicated to her) in 1903 and much of his chamber music between 1906 and 1913. Tovey made his London debut in 1900 and the next year made London and the Home Counties his base until the First World War. He appeared regularly as a concert pianist and chamber musician. His repertoire was dominated by German music, the ‘Goldberg’ and ‘Diabelli’ Variations and ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata often featuring in his concerts – although they were hardly standard concert-fare in Edwardian recital-rooms. He also played Scarlatti and Chopin, and he performed in Debussy’s Cello Sonata at one of the New Reid Concerts in Edinburgh in 1916. He wrote articles and reviews for The Times Literary Supplement – and he composed: as well as two large-scale orchestral works – the Piano Concerto of 1903 and the Symphony in D from ten years later – four trios were composed between 1900 and 1910, a piano quartet and quintet in 1900 and two string quartets in 1909. In 1907 he began work on The Bride of Dionysus, an ambitious three-act music drama in three acts based on the Theseus-Ariadne-Phaedra triangle; it was completed in 1918.
In 1914 the Chair of Music in Edinburgh University fell vacant. Tovey successfully applied for the position and was to hold the Reid Professorship from then until his death in 1940. Perhaps his finest achievement in Edinburgh was the formation and maintenance of the Reid Symphony Orchestra. Initially there were 60 players of varying degrees of proficiency (45 of them were professionals). The Reid Orchestra gave its first concert in 1917 in the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, conducted by Tovey, and continued to perform eight concerts a year for the rest of his life – with his characteristic analytical essays in the programme notes. In spite of setbacks in his personal life (the break-up of his first marriage among them), and though he was recurrently troubled with bouts of ill heath because of arthritis and high blood-pressure (from which only practical music-making was guaranteed to lift his spirits), Tovey found himself elevated to the status of Grand Old Man. In 1929 he was appointed European Music Editor of the next major edition (the fourteenth) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Also in 1929 he was at last able to conduct the premiere of The Bride of Dionysus (in a staging by Charles Ricketts). In 1931 he published important editions of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas and Bach’s ‘48’ and The Art of Fugue. This last, for which Tovey wrote a conjectural ending to Bach’s unfinished concluding Contrapunctus XIV, was a significant factor in persuading the then Master of the King’s Musick, Edward Elgar, to recommend him for a knighthood, and he was duly dubbed Sir Donald in 1935. Hubert Foss of Oxford University Press persuaded (and then actively helped) him to collect, edit and revise a large number of his ‘essays in musical analysis’ so as to make up the famous six-volume set; ‘looking it up in Tovey’ became an entertaining and instructive activity all over the music-loving English-speaking world.
There was a double irony behind the success of the Essays in Musical Analysis, which remained popular from the late 1930s through to at least the 1960s. First, Tovey’s musical ideas, which had seemed so radical at the beginning of his career, had been unable to adjust to the revolutionary musical and social changes going on around him: William Walton and Paul Hindermith were among the few inter-War composers he was enthusiastic about, and even with Hindemith it was less the music and more the man’s all-round musicianship that appealed to him. Second, to be remembered as a writer of perceptive and beguiling analytical-descriptive essays was an odd kind of fame for a musician who considered himself first and foremost an active musician and, privately, even more a composer.
Tovey died in Edinburgh on 10 July 1940. His death passed largely unnoticed by press and population, whose thoughts were pre-occupied by the turmoil of the Second World War. Fortunately the memory of him was kept alive not least by the publication in 1952 of biography by Mary Grierson, which has been an important source of information for this essay. Tovey’s writings then in print were editions (for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music) of Beethoven’s piano sonatas (1918, with Harold Samuel) and of Bach’s Wohltemperirtes Klavier (1924, also with Harold Samuel), joined in 1931 by his A Companion to Beethoven’s Pianoforte Sonatas as well as the Essays in Musical Analysis and A Companion to ‘The Art of Fugue’ (1931). His articles from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a book about Beethoven, both edited by Hubert Foss, were published posthumously in 1944 by Oxford University Press. It was to be half a century before the next publication associated with Tovey was to appear: in 2002 Oxford University Press brought out Donald Francis Tovey: The Classics of Music – Talks, Essays, and Other Writings Previously Uncollected.
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