Donald Francis Tovey

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THE PRIME OF MISS MARY GRIERSON - Rated
All Edinburgh breathes from yonder book, to adapt Pope. It has the palpable feel of the genteel inter-wars Edinburgh world of bluestocking spinsters that is memorably depicted in Muriel Spark's Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Professor Tovey's Sunday concerts get a specific mention from one of Spark's characters as a source of spiritual refreshment. Dr Grierson was a pupil of Tovey at Edinburgh University, and clearly an outstanding one. She conducted his compositions, and hers is the one performance I have ever heard of his piano concerto. She remained devoted to him throughout his life, and after his death she was driven by her conviction that he was a great man and a great musician deserving a monument to write this biography, which she hopes will serve future biographers better equipped for the task.

I doubt there will actually be any more biographies of Tovey. He is mainly remembered as a writer of commentaries on the standard German classics, not the kind of fame that inspires whole books. Even in Tovey's lifetime his Essays in Musical Analysis raised his profile greatly, and this distressed him because he thought of himself mainly as a composer and performer. Music was his life, his obsession and his fulfilment. His appointment as professor in Edinburgh gave his career both focus and stability, neither of which were his outstanding temperamental characteristics. He loved to teach, but he was not a natural academic, and Dr Grierson is candid about his lack of personal organisation and the difficulty he had with such mundane restrictions as the length of rehearsals and broadcasts, proof-reading, replying to correspondence and tidiness in dress. He was full of boyish enthusiasm to the very end, forever taking on more projects than he could really handle, and unsuited to academic and artistic politics. He was acutely sensitive to criticism in an unworldly way, but fortunately he had people to look after him, not least Dr Grierson. It says a lot for the senate of Edinburgh University that someone had the magnanimity to point out that in that august body at that ancient and eminent seat of learning that there was only one genius among them. The history of the women in his life is revealing. From an early age he was taken under the wing of 'Miss Weisse', his first teacher. I don't think Dr Grierson ever tells us her first name, which I believe was Sophie. At times he had to fight off her obsessive management, and his naïve sensitivity was hurt when he found that she had been funding the publication of his compositions, which the publishers would never otherwise have touched. He eventually married at the age of around 40, but if we are to believe Dr Grierson he married a madwoman, and the marriage ended after about five years. A more suitable marriage some ten years later lasted until his death shortly before his 65th birthday in 1940. Dr Grierson is naturally more at home with his story when she knew him personally, and I felt rather tantalised at not being told more of the difficulty a certain Mr Kelly had with Tovey's interest in his sister, and more tantalised still with the say-no-more account she gives of a temporary estrangement between Tovey and Casals concerning one Guilhermina Suggia. Oh for another biography , I felt at that (and only at that) point.

I can only suppose Dr Grierson first knew Tovey at university. She doesn't pretend to be a professional writer, but from that point on her narrative becomes sharply more coherent and much easier to read. She has researched her hero's earlier life with daunting thoroughness, but the mass of detail left this reader wallowing slightly. I make no criticism of the fact that many of the dramatis personae seem nonentities these days - these were the people in Tovey's life, and Tovey's life is her subject. Where the later chapters are much more effective than the earlier is in relating the incidents to a systematic picture of the man. Dr Grierson rightly focuses on what mattered to Tovey rather than on what interests me about Tovey, namely his writings. She wisely steers clear of controversy, but she rejects as completely as I do any charge that Tovey's writing-style is academic. The man was a garrulous enthusiast, and he must have done much to explain great music to many another youthful enthusiast like myself. The statement that he made no claim to be a scholar is true in a sense, but misleading. Tovey's knowledge of music was wide and it was deep, but it was detailed only when he chose. He has a propensity to make casual and reckless generalisations that any well-informed amateur can see at a glance are nonsense. I also feel that he had little aptitude for philosophy, and that some of his more theoretical pronunciamentos are hot air. He was famously conservative in his musical idiom and tastes, and I simply can't form an opinion on that score because I simply don't know his compositions. Where he was strikingly un-conservative was in his conviction that music was for the masses, and my socialist heart was gladdened as I read of the enthusiasm that this product of the most exclusive English education brought to his involvement with the Workers Educational Association and the reciprocal enthusiasm that he aroused. One thing that has always frankly got on my nerves is his fixation on Beethoven. I wonder how often in the analytical essays one can find the phrases 'before Beethoven' and 'since Beethoven', and the book has a snippet from a letter in which he purports to find that Beethoven revolutionised orchestration more than any other composer before or since, which seems to me undiluted moonshine. However he would have been pleased with Dr Grierson's observation that he shared with Beethoven the characteristic of having widely-set eyes.

A great man and a great musician all the same.