By Laurence Vittes | From the May/June 2025 issue of Strings
Program notes relating to Western classical music have existed in one form or another since the 18th century—a reaction to the shift in performances from private, intimate settings to public venues. They eventually took root in the UK in roughly the 1840s. As Victorians flocked to concert halls pursuing entertainment and enlightenment, certain musician-writers found success in providing some printed background and analysis of the programs. Violinist John Ella, for instance, whose moderately whiskered portrait hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery, did so for subscribers to his popular concert series. George Grove was so successful that he went on to create his still-famous A Dictionary of Music and Musicians for Macmillan Publishers. But it was pianist, scholar, composer, and (eventual) knight Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1875–1940) who raised the program note to a literary genre when he used them to provide audiences with the means of hearing music through his unique and perceptive lens.
Advertisement
His London debut at the piano in 1901 featured music by the two composers who would come to dominate his analytical thinking: Bach’s Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, and “Hammerklavier” Piano Sonata No. 29, Op. 106. In a sign of things to come, audience members were offered extraordinarily detailed notes (11 pages for the Diabelli Variations, 23 for the Hammerklavier Sonata, and 47 for the Goldberg Variations) that were advertised for sale a month in advance of the concerts. The Musical Standard, a respected journal for musicians, praised him for “enriching the literature of music with illuminating and suggestive commentaries.” The Manchester Guardian lauded his “admirable talent” and found his English, “nervous, significant, and equipoised.”
Tovey would subsequently produce more than 350 essays, with 270 published in the seven best-selling volumes of Essays in Musical Analysis and one of Chamber Music. In 2002, a further collection, edited by Michael Tilmouth, appeared as The Classics of Music, with 73 previously unpublished works by Tovey, including essays on Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 3 in A major, Archduke Trio, and Hammerklavier Sonata; as well as invaluable notes on Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, and Tovey’s own vast Cello Concerto.
It was music by Bach through Brahms and the early-20th-century aftermath that ruled Tovey’s musical universe. He saw Purcell as England’s greatest musical genius, betrayed by being born a generation too early. He had special affinities for Handel, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, but he reserved his deepest affection for Haydn, in whom he seemed to have felt a kindred spirit.
His new frontiers were represented by Sibelius, Elgar (to whom he devoted some of his greatest analytical writings), Vaughan Williams, Walton and Hindemith, Debussy and Mahler. He wrote enthusiastically about lost causes like Granville Bantock, Julius Röntgen, and Adolf Busch. But his formidable essays did miss music of some significance. Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartók, Janáček, and Berg—all significant modernists of his time—are completely absent.
Most of Tovey’s essays originated as program notes for the Reid Orchestra concerts at the University of Edinburgh, where Tovey served as Reid Professor of Music from 1914 until his death in 1940. The orchestra—initially consisting of local amateur and professional players, with women making up a quarter of the ranks by the latter part of the 1930s—became increasingly proficient over the years. It performed 424 concerts under Tovey’s direction, becoming an essential cultural institution in Edinburgh.
A Rich Musical Existence
Tovey lived a life straight out of Masterpiece Theatre. Born to an Eton master, he was educated by Sophie Weisse, a friend of Joseph Joachim. She became Tovey’s lifelong mentor. After graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, where he read classics alongside music, he came to London, gave concerts, toured, and wrote articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica before becoming a fixture in Edinburgh.
The novelist Muriel Spark remembered how the real-life model for her Miss Jean Brodie “regularly attended Professor Tovey’s Sunday concerts in the Usher Hall.” During the Roaring Twenties, Tovey was cornered in his bath by a gun-toting Pablo Casals, jealous that his good friend had become too friendly with his partner, cellist Guilhermina Suggia. After World War II broke out, Tovey would help the composer Hans Gál escape arrest by inviting him to Edinburgh.
Tovey’s reputation in post-Edwardian musical circles was substantial. Critic Ernest Newman wrote that Tovey possessed “the most comprehensive musical mind in England,” while conductor Fritz Busch described him as “one of the rarest phenomena in the world of music.” Despite his talents, Tovey remained relatively unknown outside Britain during his lifetime, his influence spreading primarily through his writings rather than his performances or compositions.
As a composer, Tovey wrote in a post-Brahmsian Romantic style, primarily chamber works, including an excellent sonata for two cellos for Casals and Suggia. His hour-long Cello Concerto, written for Casals, remains his most significant composition—though it’s struggled to find critical support due to its length and proportions.
Advertisement
Crucial to Tovey’s musical development was his immersion in the Joachim-Busch-Serkin circle, which gave him direct access to the living DNA of the Brahmsian tradition. As a pianist, he played Brahms’ Piano Quintet with Joachim’s quartet and performed chamber music with Casals, Adolf, Hermann, Fritz Busch, and the young Rudolf Serkin, absorbing firsthand interpretive insights that informed his analytical writings. He dismissed touring as “an obsolescent and barbarous form of concert-giving,” preferring meaningful musical collaborations to commercial success.
As a performer, Tovey created an unforgettable impression. His student Janet Teissier du Cros writes in her memoir: “To say that he unwittingly bewitched me with his playing, as Othello bewitched Desdemona with his storytelling, would be an understatement. No one who heard Tovey play when he was at the height of his powers will ever forget the experience. . . . Every now and then, at a crucial moment, you were always warned to the tiptoe of attention by a fleeting glance of blue fire from Tovey’s wide-apart eyes, and for a brief moment you were absorbed into him and understood not with your own heart and mind but with his.”
Tovey made only a few recordings, most notably of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata, Op. 96, with Adila Fachiri in 1927, where he provides a structural foundation for the music while finding space for small magical rubatos. The broadcast recording of his Cello Concerto by Casals with Sir Adrian Boult conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1937 remains a transcendent, historical treasure.
Tovey’s scholarship was impressive. He purchased and meticulously annotated volumes of the new scholarly Collected Works editions of the great composers that were being published during his lifetime, and he committed Bach’s entire keyboard and organ repertoire to memory. His editions of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Beethoven’s piano and cello sonatas remain influential, with leading music historian and critic Richard Taruskin grouping Tovey alongside Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker as a major music theorist. Tovey’s articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica, particularly on harmony and form, were considered definitive for generations. Maynard Solomon, musicologist and cofounder of Vanguard Records, referenced Tovey 37 times in his landmark Beethoven biography.
A Written Legacy
Tovey built on an analytical note tradition pioneered by the Reid Concerts’ first conductor, John Thomson, in 1841, four years before the appearance of program notes in London. What distinguished Tovey’s writing was its discursive quality that analyzed complex artistic processes with engaging charm and comparative simplicity. He was interested in his readers “learning what is knowable about music as music, instead of indulging in abstruse fancies, which can never be matters of knowledge,” says Fiona Donaldson, who developed the Reid Concerts database. Musicologist Michael Tilmouth noted that “Tovey wanted to demolish the idea that everything in classical music is obvious to the meanest capacity. ‘I know it isn’t obvious to me,’ Tovey said.”
According to Donaldson, the essays “were often written at the very last minute, on the bus on the way to the printers. He wanted concertgoers to read the notes in advance—to watch, listen, and enjoy the performance, not have their heads in the program books during the concert.”
In 2022, Reuben Phillips, in the music-scholarship journal Music & Letters, highlighted Tovey’s distinctive “score-based” engagement with music: “Tovey assimilated a canon of art music by playing the piano and, crucially, collecting miniature scores. These pocket-size editions allowed him to study music anywhere, turning their small printed pages to develop his impressively comprehensive grasp of Western musical history, from Palestrina to Brahms.”
While few recordings preserve Tovey’s artistry as a performer and composer, his written words continue to resonate most powerfully through generations of music critics and scholars. In his survey for Gramophone of the greatest recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Richard Osborne quotes Tovey: “We shall never make head or tail of the Ninth Symphony until we treat it as a law unto itself.”
Matthew Brown, professor of music theory at Eastman School of Music, recalls growing up with Tovey’s influence: “My piano lessons were centered on Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Beethoven’s piano sonatas; like everyone else, I owned the Associated Board editions with Tovey’s commentaries. Grammar school music classes included numerous readings from Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis. I find myself returning to Tovey’s writings with striking regularity. I cracked open Tovey to help me in recent projects on Bach’s Art of Fugue and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I don’t know if there is anyone today writing about music in quite the same way as Tovey,” says Brown, “someone who can speak to the ordinary listener, to performers, and even music professors like me.”
Cellist Terry King says that “no one has ever described the character of a musical phrase better. His discussions about sophisticated forms lay to waste the snooty clinical renditions of academia. He called the last movement of the Schubert Ninth Symphony ‘of heavenly length’—how else could you describe it?”
Advertisement
Aaron Grad, who has been writing program notes for Orpheus Chamber Orchestra for 20 years, is “definitely a fan of Tovey! His line about the Finale of the Sibelius Violin Concerto being a ‘polonaise for polar bears’ is an all-time classic.” Dorian Bandy, whose research focuses on historical performance practice, still consults Tovey when preparing new pieces: “Even though his writings date from before so much of the secondary literature, they don’t feel outdated: they’re self-contained, pithy, and full of genuine insights.”
When Music’s Odyssey was published, composer Robin Holloway wrote with admiration and longing: “Maybe a time will come when the music of Schoenberg, Bartók, and Stravinsky will be grasped as Tovey grasps Bach to Brahms. And what would his sane, forthright, grammar-wielding yet poetic mind make of Britten, Messiaen, Nancarrow, Ligeti? And Tovey on Adams, Stockhausen, Birtwistle? Missing him becomes acute when you’re confronted by brilliant, arduous, life-enhancing but somehow uneasy or troubling musical experiences requiring just that poise, breadth, openness, suppleness that Tovey embodied.”
Some of Tovey’s writings remain unpublished, including his notes for three of Bach’s cello suites (Nos. 3, 5, and 6) written for performances by Casals and Suggia. Of the Sixth Suite he writes, “Rapid passages in single notes not only indicate but actually are masses of harmony. . . . In the D major suite there is a great prelude—a broadly designed study in arpeggios—in which the open strings of Bach’s special five-stringed instrument are made to ring like all the bells in Christendom.”
The complete note is accessible on the recently archived Reid Concerts website through the Internet Archive. Donaldson’s findings emphasize the usefulness of printed concert programs in concert presentation and programming, broadening the knowledge of this ephemera for academic research while preserving Tovey’s extraordinary contributions to musical understanding for future generations.
Finding Tovey 2.0
David Serkin Ludwig comes from a rather musical lineage: pianist Peter Serkin (his uncle); pianist Rudolf Serkin (his grandfather); violinist Adolf Busch (his great-grandfather); and conductor Fritz Busch (his great-uncle) all make appearances in his family tree. Ludwig himself is a composer and teacher who also serves as dean of music at the Juilliard School.
When did you begin reading Tovey and why?
I learned about Tovey from Fritz Busch’s book Aus dem Leben eines Musikers (printed in English as Pages from a Musician’s Life). Busch spoke of Tovey as an almost mythical musical figure whom you could wake up in the middle of the night and ask to sing the second violin part from any section of any Haydn quartet, and he’d immediately do so. My first teacher, Richard Hoffmann, who was one of Schoenberg’s last students, spoke of Tovey quite a bit, too—all these musicians were no more than one degree of separation from each other. Tovey’s writing helped inform my time as a composition student, learning about classic form and analysis in music.
Advertisement
Do you recommend Tovey to your students?
Yes, but on rare occasions: The writing is fairly elaborate (as was the style), and he was very focused on a small but mighty cohort of composers. I do like that he’s not so doctrinaire as some theorists and as a composer himself offers tools that get inside of the creative process a bit deeper than some other analytical methodologies.
How have Tovey’s analyses and other writings held up technically and musically?
There’s much to draw on from Tovey’s writings for musicians due to his background as a performer and composer, and his methods of analysis are full of creative insight as a result of his musical pursuits. It’s of another era, but I admire the deep veneration he has for the composers upon whom he focuses his intensely informed scholarship.
Do we need more Donald Toveys today?
I think we always need people who turn passion into expertise. Tovey lived in a world where what was considered “repertoire” existed in a much narrower band than our great plurality today, but nothing is wrong with pursuing what brings you joy and provokes further exploration. Perhaps a Tovey of our time would have more eclectic tastes, but it’s also worth noting that he was more than 20 years old when Brahms died, so that was his contemporary music.
—LV
Advertisement
