Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1875–1940)
by Peter R. Shore
Donald Francis Tovey: An Introduction
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, just 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. This relationship 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
the 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 philosophy, and 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.
When Dr Walter Parratt, organist of St George’s Chapel at Windsor,
gave Tovey – then thirteen years old – his first instruction
in counterpoint, it became almost instantly obvious that he
was a born contrapuntist. Although Tovey was deeply attached
to Dr Parratt, he had a lifelong affection and admiration also
for his two later teachers, James Higgs, who taught counterpoint
at the Royal College of Music, and Sir Hubert Parry, with whom
he began to study composition at the age of fourteen. Tovey
was considered for the Royal College of Music but the authorities
there were faced with a dilemmaas he would have started at a
point far beyond that at which most of their students finished
their formal musical education. In 1892, for example, at the
age of seventeen, he wrote a counterpoint exercise consisting
of thirteen bars combining a six-part canon on a cantus firmus
with imitative treatment of three other counterpoints, twenty
parts in all. This compositional dexterity was combined with
an increasingly phenomenal memory, which laid the foundation
of the comprehensive knowledge of classical music for which
he became famous. He was also distinguishing himself as a performer:
in 1891, at Northlands, he had performed such works as the Schubert
B Flat Trio, violin sonatas by Beethoven and Brahms (then still
very much a living composer) and the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, and
had accompanied Marie Fillinger (a friend of Robert and Clara
Schumann) in Schubert and Brahms songs.
Tovey had met the great violinist Joseph Joachim (a personal
friend of Brahms, whose Violin Concerto was written for him)
on a visit to Eton College when Tovey was only twelve; they
were to remain friends until Joachim’s death in 1907. Their
first public concert together – which took place in the Albert
Institute at Windsor on 15 March 1894, three months before Tovey’s
nineteenth birthday – opened with Brahms’ G major sonata for
piano and violin and closed with Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata.
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 concert-pianist and composer.
She also financed the publication of the Piano Concerto 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 concert
repertoire was dominated by German music, the ‘Goldberg’ and
‘Diabelli’ Variations and ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata often featuring
in his concerts. He also played Scarlatti and Chopin, and he
performed in Debussy’s Cello Sonata at one of the New Reid Concerts
in 1916. He wrote articles and reviews for The Times
Literary Supplement – and he composed. His Piano Concerto
(dedicated to Miss Weisse) was written in 1903 and his Symphony
in D in 1913; four trios were composed between 1900 and 1910,
a piano quartet in 1900, two string quartets in 1909 and a piano
quintet in 1900. 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 drama; it was completed in
1918.
Tovey’s private life, though, was unhappy. He had married in
April 1916, but it was apparent very early on in the marriage
that his wife suffered from severe psychiatric problems, and
the marriage ended in divorce in 1922. The effects of this deteriorating
relationship – combined with the drain on his energies of being
such a visible and charismatic professor – brought the flow
of his compositions to a virtual standstill. The position was
not helped by the realisation that, as a composer, he had little
in common even with the contemporaries he admired, like Sibelius
and Holst, let alone the ones he didn’t (the atonal Schoenberg,
Stravinsky after Petrushka). When in 1925 Tovey married
Clara Wallace, who had been a pupil at Miss Weisse’s school,
Weisse at first made a semblance of approval but remained to
the end unreconciled to the marriage – and there were many other
instances when Tovey felt that Miss Weisse was interfering in
his personal and professional life.
On the strength of his writing he was invited to contribute
to the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
obliging with around fifty major entries on musical forms and
the achievements of the great composers. His relations with
Miss Weisse had become tense and in 1912 his friendship with
the cellist Pablo Casals and his wife Guillhermina Suggia went
sadly wrong. Guillhermina Suggia was a very attractive young
woman as well as a musician and her husband may have, unjustly,
become jealous of the innocent attention shown towards her by
Tovey. Tovey could be as hot tempered as his Spanish friend
and the ensuing quarrel, however unfounded, caused a rift between
them, which lasted until 1925.
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. For
six months of the year he taught the history of music, analysis,
orchestration and interpretation, and organised concerts for
the university as well as for the people of Edinburgh in general.
For the rest of the year he wrote, edited the musical classics
and continued his concert tours. Perhaps his finest achievement
in Edinburgh was the formation and maintenance of the Reid Symphony
Orchestra. 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 1925 he began his first series of broadcast
keyboard talks – but as a broadcaster he was unpredictable:
at best, he was natural and fluent; at worst, when he was troubled
by time limits, or by the fact that he could not walk up and
down as he discoursed, it was hesitant and discursive; however
interesting, it was technically bad broadcasting.
He gave several prestigious university lectures, among them
eight on Beethoven in Edinburgh in 1922. The ten Cramb Lectures,
Music in Being, were delivered at Glasgow University
in 1925, the year in which he added Boston and New York to his
list of recital venues. In 1929 he was at last able to conduct
the premiere of The Bride of Dionysus (the décor by Charles
Ricketts). In 1931 he published important editions, alone or
in collaboration, 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 published
between 1935 and 1939; ‘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. There was to be one more tour de force
with the writing in 1934 of the Cello Concerto (it is an ambitious
hour in length), which was conceived for Casals, who was proud
to give it its first performance on 22 November 1934.
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 Tovey was kept alive not least by the publication in 1952
of Mary Grierson’s biography, 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 Bach’s Wohltemperirtes Klavier (1924, with
Harold Samuel) and of Beethoven’s piano sonatas (1918, 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.
© Peter Shore, 2010
See also
Tovey's The Bride of
Dionysus Recording Session
Tovey's The Bride
of Dionysus Synopsis with musical examples
http://www.donaldtovey.com/
