Tovey and the Symphony after Beethoven

DONALD Francis Tovey's writings have polarized scholarly opinion since his death in 1940. By 1980, opposing critical positions had been staked out by Hans Keller and Joseph Kerman, who respectively styled his analyses as blandly descriptive and humanely critical. Subsequently, Tovey (1875–1940) has been characterized as a ‘Victorian man of letters’, a product of fin-de-siecle British intellectual history, and a precursor of post-war music theory. The informality of his approach, his belief in the virtues of the ‘naïve listener’ and the capacity of musical works to reveal their aesthetic content without the need for systematic theory have proved frustrating and appealing in equal measure, furnishing evidence of conservatism and postmodernity avant la lettre. These debates notwithstanding, his writings have proved remarkably enduring as aids to informed listening, sustaining value judgements about composers and works irrespective of the vicissitudes of academic reappraisal.

The Essays in Musical Analysis have enjoyed an especially rich afterlife. Conceived chiefly as programme notes for the Reid Concerts in Edinburgh and (for the Brahms symphonies) the visit of the Meiningen Orchestra to London in 1902, the Essays have proved uniquely successful at mediating popular instruction and analytical insight. Their generic nuances – the ways they convey an essentially, if sometimes covertly, historical model of how genres develop – however await detailed excavation. Tovey's hostility to abstraction complicates this task, or at least makes it a simple matter in some cases and an act of lexical archaeology in others. His essays on the concerto, for example, mobilize the notion of the genre's ‘true’ form expounded in ‘The Classical Concerto’, in which Tovey confidently installed a Mozartian paradigm as a generic benchmark. Despite writing extensively on its repertoire, however, he never articulated a comparable model for the symphony. The tendency, evident particularly in German-language literature, to orientate the genre's history around Beethoven is not overtly pursued, despite being strongly implied, and no single essay sketches a paradigm of symphonic practice, Beethovenian or otherwise. Tovey's criticisms of the symphonic and concertante repertoires nevertheless operate comparable methodologies: a notional ‘true’ symphony, which coordinates critical engagement with a view of the genre's proper evolution, still underpins analysis.