Sir Donald Francis Tovey was born at Eton on 17 July 1875. His father had been a master at Eton College and a church minister. From a very early age Tovey studied piano and composition, with a special interest in counterpoint, and was awarded a scholarship in 1894 to Balliol College, Oxford, from where he graduated in 1898 with an honours degree in Philosophy and Ethics. He achieved early fame as a scholar, pianist, composer and concert organiser. He met and corresponded with many of the major musical figures of his day, by whom he was held in high regard. In 1901-1902 he gave a series of concerts in London, performing several of his own works, also giving recitals in Berlin and Vienna. He continued to tour until 1914 when he became the Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh, holding the chair until his death. While at the University he continued to write, conduct research, and compose prolifically. He was knighted in 1935. His opera “the Bride of Dionysius” was produced in Edinburgh in 1929 and his Cello Concerto (composed 1900) was performed and recorded by the great Pablo Casals. He also composed a Symphony (1932), chamber, vocal and piano works.

Though clearly possessing a major compositional talent, his works have been largely overshadowed by his literary career. Tovey bequeathed his substantial library of scores and music books to Edinburgh University. His criticisms and analyses of music are highly acclaimed and many remain in print. Among these his “Companion to the Art of Fugue”, written in 1931, must be counted one of the most important, dealing as it did with the most technical issues of counterpoint, fugal construction and so on. Tovey wrote, “Fugue is not so much a musical form as a musical texture” – believing that fugue was more a technique of composition than a “form” in the same sense as the sonata or minuet/trio (for example).

Tovey’s analyses are now thought by many academics to be faulted by his over-fondness for Germanic classicism, and by the sheer depth of his passion, almost fanaticism, evident in his work. The variety and number of his researches and their conclusions is staggering by any measure, and there is no longer universal acceptance of his views. For example, Peter Seivewright, pianist and music teacher, finds Tovey’s analytical work simply wrong much of the time and his work on Beethoven symphonies in particular, woefully incorrect. He believes however that Tovey’s particular importance lies in his philosophies of music, for example his concept of “the innocent ear, which he articulated with great thoroughness. This is the idea that a piece of music is the same no matter who listens to it and when, thus rendering irrelevant the concepts of “modernism” and “historicism”. However, as Grove puts it, Tovey remains one of the greatest musicians of his period, and “his essays at their best are magnificent, the product of a broadly stocked mind of acute sensibility and rare insight”. He died in Edinburgh on 10 July 1940.