[영국]Sir Donald Francis Tovey

Sir Donald Francis Tovey

(17 July 1875 – 10 July 1940) was a British musical analyst, musicologist, writer on music, composer, conductor and pianist. He had been best known for his Essays in Musical Analysis and his editions of works by Bach and Beethoven, but since the 1990s his compositions (relatively small in number but substantial in musical content) have been recorded and performed with increasing frequency. The recordings have mostly been well received by reviewers.

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영국의 피아니스트·작곡가·음악이론가.

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피아노와 대위법을 공부한 뒤 옥스퍼드대학교에 입학해 1898년 졸업했다. 1900~02년 런던·베를린·빈에서 자작곡들로 연주회를 열었고, 1903년 런던에서 자신의 피아노 협주곡을 연주했으며, 1906~12년 영국 남서부 첼시에서 실내악들로 수차례 연주회를 열었다. 피아노 협주곡 이외에도 현악 4중주 2곡, 오페라 〈디오니소스의 신부 The Bride of Dionysus〉(1929 초연), 첼로 협주곡(1934) 등을 작곡했다.

1914년 에든버러대학의 음악교수로 임명되었고, 1917년 같은 대학에 리드 심포니 오케스트라를 세웠다. 이 관현악단의 연주회 팜플렛에 지속적으로 작곡의 문제들을 다룬 예리한 분석적 글들을 썼고, 나중에 이것들을 모아 〈음악 분석 에세이 Essays in Musical Analysis〉(6권, 1935~39)로 편집·출판했다. 이 책에서 그는 '딸림음 속의 음악'(완전히 조바꿈되지 않은 음악)과 '딸림음 위의 음악'(완전히 조바꿈된 음악)을 구별하는 등 음악분석의 양식적 문제를 다루었다.

그밖에 음악사 연구물로 〈브리태니커 백과사전 Encyclopædia Britannica〉에 기고한 글들과 이것들을 재편집한 〈브리태니커 백과사전 음악 항목 모음집 Musical Articles from the Encyclopædia Britannica〉(1944), 〈음악 에세이와 강의 Essays and Lectures on Music〉(1949년 H. J. 포스 편집) 등이 있다. 후대의 음악 이론가들(특히 솅커와 그의 추종자들)만큼 체계적이지는 않지만 세련되고 위트 있는 독특한 스타일로 음악비평의 영역을 넓혔으며 또한 음악비평을 문한 장르의 한 부분으로 확립하는 데 기여했다. 1935년 기사작위를 받았다.[다음백과]

Career

Tovey began to study the piano and compose at an early age. He eventually studied composition with Hubert Parry.

He became a close friend of eminent violinist, and friend of Brahms, Joseph Joachim, and played piano with the Joachim Quartet in a 1905 performance of perhaps Brahms's most highly regarded chamber work, the F minor Piano Quintet, Op. 34. He gained moderate fame as a composer, to the point of having his works performed in Berlin and Vienna as well as in London. He performed his own Piano Concerto under Sir Henry Wood in 1903, and under Hans Richter in 1906. During this period he also contributed heavily to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, writing many of the articles on music of the 18th and 19th centuries.

In 1914 he began to teach music at the University of Edinburgh, succeeding Frederick Niecks as Reid Professor of Music; there he founded the Reid Orchestra. For their concerts he wrote a series of programme notes, many of which were eventually collected into the books for which he is now best known, the Essays in Musical Analysis.

As he devoted more and more time to the Reid Orchestra, to writing essays and commentaries and to editing his editions of Bach and Beethoven, Tovey composed and performed less often later in life; but the few major pieces he did complete in his latter years are on a large scale, such as his Symphony of 1913 and the Cello Concerto completed in 1935 for his longtime friend Pablo Casals of Mahlerian length. He also wrote an opera, The Bride of Dionysus. In illustrated radio talks recorded in his last few years, his playing is severely affected by a problem with one of his hands.

Tovey made several editions of other composers' music, including a 1931 completion of Bach's Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of Fugue). His edition of the 48 Preludes and Fugues of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, in two volumes (Vol. 1, March 1924; Vol. 2, June 1924), with fingerings by Harold Samuel, for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, has been reprinted continually ever since. His completion of the (presumed) final unfinished fugue in The Art of Fugue has nothing of pastiche about it, and in fact has often been recorded as the final piece of the set.

He was knighted in 1935, reportedly on the recommendation of Sir Edward Elgar, who greatly admired Tovey's edition of Bach.

He died in 1940 in Edinburgh. His archive, including scores, letters, handwritten programme notes and annotations in the scores of others, is housed in the Special Collections Unit of the University of Edinburgh library. In 2009 Richard Witts created a simple catalogue of the archival material available from the University on-line.

Compositions

See also: List of compositions by Donald Tovey

Tovey as a theorist of tonality

Tovey's belief that classical music has an aesthetic that can be deduced from the internal evidence of the music itself has influenced subsequent writers on music.

In his essays, Tovey developed a theory of tonal structure and its relation to classical forms that he applied in his descriptions of pieces in his famous program notes for the Reid Orchestra, as well as in more technical and extended writings. His aesthetic regards works of music as organic wholes, and he stresses the importance of understanding how musical principles manifest themselves in different ways within the context of a given piece. He was fond of using figurative comparisons to illustrate his ideas, as in this quotation from the Essays (on Brahms' Handel Variations, Op. 24, Tovey 1922):

The relation between Beethoven's freest variations and his theme is of the same order of microscopical accuracy and profundity as the relation of a bat's wing to a human hand.

Similarly in his book on Beethoven, dictated in 1936 but published posthumously in 1944:^[1]

We do not expect a return to the home tonic to be associated with a theme we have never heard before, any more than we expect on returning from our holiday to find our house completely redecorated and refurnished and inhabited by total strangers.