Overview

For much of the twentieth century, Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940) was Britain's most celebrated and influential writer on music, largely as a result of the considerable corpus of his work published by Oxford University Press in the 1930s and posthumously in the 1940s. However, as a prolific and popular lecturer, broadcaster, and essayist, he left many scattered writings which the Press did not publish in those years. With the sole exceptions of the Bach and Beethoven commentaries written for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, The Classics of Music assembles here for the first time all the significant completed public writings of Tovey which have not appeared heretofore under the Oxford imprint. Initially edited by Michael Tilmouth, late Tovey Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh, the volume has been completed by David Kimbell and Roger Savage, also of Edinburgh - the institution at which Tovey himself held the Reid Chair of Music from 1914. Here, then, are over seventy essays in musical analysis; fifteen composer-articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica; two complete lecture series (one of them a sophisticated exploration of key-relationships in Beethoven); a sequence of radio talks for the ordinary listener; a survey of German music from the Renaissance to Hugo Wolf; and two dozen other essays, papers, scholarly reviews, and affectionate obituaries. All new Tovey - and all characteristically stimulating and stylish - making this essential collection available to a new generation of musicians.

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9780198162148

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Reviews

The Classics of Music offers a discussion of Beethoven, and the composers a hundred years on either side of him, in such a way that Tovey emerges with ever greater clarity as an educated, articulate, and astute commentator on the works that - still - form the cornerstone of Western art music. It is a project that was well worth undertaking and well worth completing. Music and Letters For anyone for whom Tovey's perceptions remain vital and his work an indispensable source of reference, this volume contains a wealth of detail, much of it new. Music and Letters For students of early twentieth-century British music, these essays provide an invaluable perspective on some neglected figures. Music and Letters ... a work that has evidently been a labour of love at every step of its creation. Music and Letters Its many insights and some sustained stretches of brilliant illumination make this new volume indispensable. Robin Holloway, London Review of Books A magnificent work ... Tovey's is a voice that still needs to be heard. Times Higher Education Supplement More than welcome in these intellectually confused times ... huge and superbly edited ... This collection is particularly valuable for its revelations of [Tovey's] musical and mental development, allowing us to gain a rounded, fully representative view of his achievements and failures alike, together with his struggles to communicate to best effect. Musical Times Full of good things. Charles Rosen, Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

Donald Francis Tovey was Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh from 1914 until his death in 1940

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