Sir Donald Francis Tovey (17 July 1875 – 10 July 1940) was a British musical analyst, musicologist, writer on music, composer, conductor and pianist. He had been best known for his Essays in Musical Analysis and his editions of the works of Bach and Beethoven but since the 1990s his compositions (relatively small in number but very substantial in musical content) have been recorded and performed with increasing frequency. It remains to be seen, however, if these recordings, which have mostly been well-received by reviewers, will earn Tovey a permanent place in the canon of 20th century British music, or whether he will remain a niche composer.
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Tovey began to study the piano and compose at an early age. He eventually studied composition with Hubert Parry.
Tovey became a close friend of Joseph Joachim, and played piano with the Joachim Quartet in a 1905 performance of Brahms's Piano Quintet. He gained some moderate fame as a composer, having his works performed in Berlin and Vienna as well as London. He performed his own Piano Concerto under the conductorship of Sir Henry Wood in 1903 and under Hans Richter in 1906. During this period he also contributed heavily to the music articles in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, writing a large portion of the content on music of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In 1914 he began to teach music at the University of Edinburgh, succeeding Frederick Niecks as Reid Professor of Music; there he founded the Reid Orchestra. For their concerts he wrote a series of programme notes, many of which were eventually collected into the books for which he is now best known, the Essays in Musical Analysis.
As he devoted more and more time to the Reid Orchestra, to writing essays and commentaries and to editing his editions of Bach and Beethoven, Tovey composed and performed less often later in life but the few major pieces that he completed during this later period are on a large scale, such as his Symphony of 1913 and the Cello Concerto that he completed in 1935 for his longtime friend Pablo Casals. The latter concerto is on Mahlerian scale and requires about sixty minutes to perform. Tovey also wrote an opera, The Bride of Dionysus. In illustrated radio talks recorded in his last few years, his playing can be heard to be severely affected by a problem with one of his hands.
Tovey made several editions of other composers' music and in 1931 produced a completion of Bach's The Art of Fugue. His edition of the 48 Preludes and Fugues of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, in two volumes (Vol. 1, March 1924; Vol. 2, June 1924), with fingering by Harold Samuel, for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, has been reprinted continually ever since. Tovey's completion of the (presumed) final unfinished fugue in The Art of Fugue has nothing of pastiche about it and has often been recorded as the final piece of the set.
Tovey was knighted in 1935, reportedly through the recommendation of Sir Edward Elgar, who greatly admired Tovey's edition of Bach.
He died in 1940 in Edinburgh. His archive, including scores, letters, hand-written programme notes and annotations to the scores of others, is housed in the Special Collections Unit of the library of the University of Edinburgh. In 2009 Richard Witts created a simple catalogue of the archive material, which is available from the university on-line.
In his essays, Tovey developed a theory of tonal structure and its relation to classical forms that he applied in his descriptions of pieces in his famous program notes for the Reid Orchestra, as well as in more technical and extended writings. His aesthetic regards works of music as organic wholes, and he stresses the importance of understanding how musical principles manifest in different ways within the context of a given piece. He was fond of using metaphors to illustrate his ideas, as in this quotation from the Essays (on Brahms' Handel Variations, Tovey 1922):
The relation between Beethoven's freest variations and his theme is of the same order of microscopical accuracy and profundity as the relation of a bat's wing to a human hand.
Tovey's belief that classical music has an aesthetic that can be deduced from the internal evidence of the music itself has influenced subsequent writers on music.
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