Words of wisdom

Musical Times, Summer 2002 by Thomson, Andrew

The classics of music: talks, essays, and other writings previously uncollected Donald Francis Tovey Edited by Michael Tilmouth, David Kimbell & Roger Savage Oxford UP (Oxford, 2001); li, 821pp; L60. ISBN 0 19 816214 6.

Derrick Puffett on music Edited by Kathryn Bailey Puffett Ashgate (Aldershot, 2001); xvi, 813pp; L60. ISBN 0 7546 0399 7.

ANDREW THOMSON is stimulated by the fine critical writings of two distinguished music analysts

FOR AN OLDER GENERATION of thinking musicians and music lovers Donald Francis Tovey's Essays in musical analysis (1935-39) were a fundamental source of wisdom. In the so-called Athens of the North, where for a quarter century (1914-40) he occupied the Reid Chair of Music at the University and conducted the Reid Orchestra, he was an almost divine figure of awesome power, of whose whims and eccentricities many stories were told. At school in Edinburgh I learned from my two music teachers - both devoted former students and players in the Reid Orchestra - that such was his international reputation and connections that artists of the calibre of Schweitzer, Casals, Suggia, Hindemith and Boult would perform at his concerts and talk to the students. Two other venerable former students - one of whom was Mary Grierson, author of the biography Donald Francis Tovey (1952), which stands up well today - were still on the staff when I in my turn entered the Faculty in the mid-1960s, but by then the living lessons of the master had become the dead hand of tradition. Fortunately, under the enlightened professorship of Sidney Newman, the new generation of Kenneth Leighton, Peter Williams and David Kimbell brought new life to Tovey's ethos of humane, literate scholarship enriched by high performing ability on keyboard instruments. Of course his actual writings remained de rigeur in those blissfully innocent pre-Schenkerian days, and I certainly appreciated his clarity and force of expression, as well as his strikingly novel perspectives.

More than welcome in these intellectually confused times, a huge and superbly edited volume has now appeared from Oxford University Press entitled The classics of music, consisting of `Talks, essays, and other writings previously uncollected'. Much of it had been achieved by the late Professor Michael Tilmouth before his untimely death in 1987, the completion being made by Professor Kimbell and his literary colleague Roger Savage. Tilmoutb's extensive introduction critically surveys Tovey's professional life and work in all its astonishing diversity, as a concert pianist of international calibre, composer, conductor, thinker, writer and teacher. All this reflected his highly unusual upbringing within the English establishment at Windsor and Balliol College, Oxford. His remarkable musical education had been pursued on a purely private basis -- piano with Miss Sophie Weiss (the inspired head-- mistress of a girls' school, who became his dominating mentor), harmony and counterpoint with Walter Parratt (organist of St George's Windsor), and composition with Hubert Parry; at the same time, he was 'adopted' by no less than the great violinist and friend of Brahms, Joseph Joachim, with whose string quartet he made regular appearances as a pianist. Thus he experienced the finest German Classical and Romantic traditions at first hand. Though also an admirer of Wagner, his robust bottom of English commonsense enabled him to treat with scepticism the nationalistic New German movement and its divisive concepts of absolute and programme music. His article `German music', bravely issued in 1915, consists of a seamless survey from Isaac and Hassler to Wagner and Wolf, avoiding ideological controversies.

In their own fine but all too brief preface, Kimbell and Savage discuss his extraordinarily broadbased culture which extended far beyond music. That he was steeped in the Bible, the Classics, Shakespeare and eighteenth-century English literature - his clergyman father being a Cambridge Classicist and an authority on the poet Thomas Gray - is clearly manifest in the literary style of his writings, copiously larded with quotations. These, however, are frequently inaccurate, for Tovey's scholarship in general, relying to a great extent on a capacious memory, was not exactly distinguished by what the literary critic George Steiner called `the holiness of the minute particular'. (Such errors have been meticulously corrected in the excellent footnotes, which also provide a great deal of fascinating additional information.) At Oxford he read Classics, excelling in philosophy under Edward Caird, an authority on Plato, Kant and Hegel; these idealist thinkers certainly inspired Tovey to conceive the true work of art in holistic terms. Before long, however, in parallel with his Cambridge contemporary Bertrand Russell, he was moving away from this elevated philosophical position towards a more empirically based standpoint, becoming keenly interested in the ideas of modern mathematics and science. This accounts for the frequent appearance of astronomical metaphors in his musical writings, such as `The problem of the three bodies'.