"It may expected that no more words from Tovey’s
pen will ever be published". These words were uttered by Hubert
Foss, the editor of Essays and Lectures on Music (1949), the
last of the posthumous volumes of Tovey’s writings prepared for the
press. He was fortunately wrong, but it would take over 50 years to
prove him wrong!
Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940), the Reid Professor
of Music at Edinburgh University from 1914 until his death is best remembered
by musicians and musicologists the world over as the author of Essays
in Musical Analysis. But what is forgotten is that Tovey regarded
himself first and foremost as a musician. Making music was the real
business of Tovey’s life; everything else was secondary. He was not
content to just be a pianist, conductor and composer, but as an editor,
writer, broadcaster, scholar, and teacher his aim was to bring his knowledge
and love of music to a much wider audience.
The idea behind this present volume could be traced
back to the visit to the Reid Music library at Edinburgh University
in 1982 by Edward Heath, former Prime Minister and life-long Toveyan.
Heath had been shown some of the items in the Library’s extensive archives
of Toveyana which did not appear in the various Tovey volumes the Associated
Board of the Royal Schools of Music, and the Oxford University Press
had published in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. It occurred to Michael
Tilmouth, Tovey Professor of Music in the University of Edinburgh that
collecting some of these unpublished items into what he called a Tovey
Miscellany might be appropriate. This idea grew and by 1986 Tilmouth
had decided to call the result The Classics of Music. Unfortunately
Tilmouth died in 1987. But fortunately for us David Kimbell, Professor
of Music, and Roger Savage, Senior Lecturer in English Literature both
at the University of Edinburgh set about completing Tilmouth’s work.
As the editors point out in the introduction, the contents
vary a great deal in quality and in the polish of their presentation.
Tovey relied very much on his incredible powers of memory and that this
inevitably resulted in mistakes. But he was right far more often than
he was wrong; and the editors consider that to present him whole, warts
and all, is more histographically just than would be a selection of
the writings of the man who was, after all, by far the most considerable
English writer on music in the first half of the twentieth century.
The book is divided into six parts, of which part one
is Essays in Musical Analysis. Most people who know about Tovey
have done so through his published Essays in Musical Analysis and will
be familiar with the form and content of the essays. The essays which
follow, all of them published in connection with particular concerts
in the first instance and none previously reprinted in book form, constitute
a substantial supplement to the seven volumes of reprinted pieces brought
out by the Oxford University Press between 1935 and 1944. The essays
here range from cantatas by Bach to William Walton’s coronation march,
Crown Imperial, which was performed at the coronation of King George
VI on 12th May 1937. Tovey and the Reid Orchestra performed
many works by his contemporaries, such as, Hebridean Sea-Poems, Caristiona
by Granville Bantock and Sibelius’ symphonic Fantasia, Pohjola’s Daughter,
Op. 49. There are essays on his own music, such as the Piano Concerto
in A major Op. 15, which was performed as recently as 2000 in New York
by the young Japanese pianist, Makiko Hirata and the Jupiter Symphony
under their conductor, Jens Nygaard.
Part Two. Tovey as journalist, reviewer, and obituarist
(1902-1911, 1926-1934). Tovey reviewed performances of the Brahms
F Major Quintet and the Beethoven A Minor Quartet in 1902 given by the
Joachim Quartet. This was a sympathetic review as Tovey was a good friend
of the violinist, Joseph Joachim and Tovey would perform the Brahms
Piano Quintet with the Joachim Quartet as pianist three years later
in 1905 at a Northlands Chamber Music Concert. Two years later in 1907
Tovey was to write the obituary of Joseph Joachim for The Times Literary
Supplement. Reviewing concerts given by the Queens Hall Orchestra in
1902 conducted by Arthur Nikisch Tovey was scathing about Nikisch’s
interpretation of Schubert’s C Major Symphony. "Now it is surely
an extraordinary thing that Herr Nikisch should show, side by side with
so many fine qualities a tendency to indulge in the most distressing
vagaries of the instrumental virtuoso". It was Nikisch interpretation
that angered Tovey not his technique. As a conductor Tovey’s technique
was not altogether adequate and when his old friend Fritz Busch visited
him in Edinburgh in 1934 he remarked that he still noticed ‘many uncertainties’
in his (Tovey’s) beat, though he did not think that it had reached ‘Furtwängler’s
state of Holy Trinity vibrato’!
Part Three. Composer-Articles in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica (1929). Tovey’s association with the Encyclopaedia Britannica
fell into three phases and began in 1905 when the editor Hugh Chisholm,
asked for his assistance in planning the musical content of its Eleventh
edition, which appeared in 1910-11. Tovey’s help consisted in revising,
supplementing, replacing, or recommending others to revise-supplement-replace
the articles on music by earlier writers which had appeared in the Ninth
Edition.
The second phase from 1920-5 consisted of revising
and re-revising the concluding section of his central article ‘Music’,
for the supplementary volumes which comprised the Twelfth and Thirteenth
Editions (1922, 1926).
The third phase from 1925-9 consisted of making or
commissioning further modifications and additions for the reorganized
Fourteenth Edition.
A selection of Tovey’s own longer pieces on Forms and
Techniques was made after his death by Hubert Foss and published in
1944 by the Oxford University Press as Musical Articles from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until now none of Tovey’s articles
on individual composers has been reprinted. There are nearly a hundred
composer-articles by various writers in the Encyclopaedia Britannica
14 but only sixteen had the initials ‘D.F.T.’ printed at the end of
them. Fifteen of those so signed are reprinted in The Classics of Music.
Most of the articles on composers cover particular aspects of the composers
work. In the case of Mozart it is the opera and the requiem. Only the
article on Beethoven can be considered a complete biography.
Part Four. Two lecture series from the 1920s.
After his appointment to the Reid chair at Edinburgh University in 1914
Tovey became well known as a lecturer. The eight Beethoven lectures
were given on a weekly basis in 1922 probably in Edinburgh; and the
ten Cramb lectures ‘Music in Being’, were given at Glasgow University
in 1925. Both series were delivered improvised, i.e. without scripts
written out beforehand, and quite possibly with little in the way of
notes either. The lectures have come down to us in the form of typed
transcriptions deposited in the Tovey Archive, Reid Library, University
of Edinburgh and were the result of typing-up after the event from the
note-pads of a very competent stenographer, or succession of stenographers,
who tried to get down everything Tovey had to say. The standard of recording
and transcription seems to be high, though there are a few fairly obvious
mistakes of hearing or typing (‘Fidele’ for ‘Fidelio, ‘falling stanza’
for ‘four-line stanza’ etc) In the transcripts of lectures and radio
talks, the editorial policy has been that phrases which in the originals
are clearly there simply for rhetorical emphasis or informal viva
voce continuity are sometimes silently omitted.
Part Five. Broadcast talks for the BBC in the 1930s.
Tovey was regarded by all who knew him as a born talker. So at the suggestion
of his friend Sir Walford Davis, Tovey was invited to give a number
of BBC broadcasts in the 1920s and 1930s. Broadcasting was still very
much in its infancy and everything went out live, so nothing survives
of those talks which were apparently given in 1926 and 1933. In 1934
he gave a series on Beethoven’s keyboard works, and like Sir Walford,
Tovey simply sat at the piano and spoke impromptu. Tovey stressed in
the first of the twenty-minute broadcasts that they were not going to
be talks illustrated by music, but music illustrated by talk. Fortunately
the talks were taken down in shorthand and converted into typescripts
which now survive on microfilm in the BBC Archives. Tovey was a nervous
and inexpert broadcaster which can be surmised from a memorandum from
the Music Programme Advisory Panel after the Beethoven series which
noted that Tovey was ‘above the heads of the ordinary listener’. After
the second series: ‘He is not easy to listen to’, and later: ‘would
it be wise [for him] to write out more?’ In his next series in 1937,
‘Music and the Ordinary Listener’ Tovey did read from fully prepared
scripts. The criterion for selection here has been coherence and readability
in book form. Thus complete Keyboard Talks are omitted which serve primarily
to provide fairly brief prologues or postludes to the playing of extended
pieces on the piano or gramophone. Tovey of course frequently illustrated
the points he was making at the studio piano. Some of these illustrations
have been turned into musical examples here; others become score-references.
Part Six. Pieces on Several Occasions (1899-1939).
The items in this final section span Tovey’s writing career and
are arranged in chronological order. Many of them were not included
by Foss in his Tovey collection Essays and Lectures on Music 1949
for one reason or another. It is commendable that the editors of this
book have seen fit to include them. The piece on Emanuel Moór’s
development of the ‘duplex-coupler’ pianoforte shows that Tovey had
a keen interest in the technical development of musical instruments.
He was so enthusiastic about this one that he prophesied that ‘the ordinary
pianoforte will be extinct as the Dodo in ten years’. Tovey had ignored
economic factors: the Moór mechanism could not be fitted to existing
pianos and Moór pianos were very much more expensive than conventional
pianos. So it was the Moórs piano that became extinct. The piece
on ‘The Needs of an Orchestra’ gives us an insight into his thoughts
and feelings on the practicalities of running the Reid Orchestra. He
was as much concerned with the lack or rehearsal time for his orchestra
as with the problems of funding in order to provide instruments as well
as providing enough work to give something like a livelihood to his
musicians. It is distressing to note that after nearly one hundred years
conditions haven’t changed much for the working professional musician
or orchestra!
