The best thing ever written about music in our language

If I had a teenage child with a passion for serious music, I would not hesitate to give him or her Essays in Musical Analysis by Donald Francis Tovey. This is a formidable work. The first volume is on symphonies, the second on symphonies, variations and orchestral polyphony, the third on concertos, the fourth on illustrative music and the final volume on vocal music. There is also an index volume which includes a valuable glossary, and the general introduction provides a dazzlingly clear explanation of such basic concepts as key, tonic, dominant, tonality and sonata form. There are copious musical illustrations throughout. You say a teenager is not going to wade through six volumes of uncompromising gravity. Not true. I discovered Tovey for myself in the school library when I was 15, and read him virtually all through. It provided me with the basis of my musical education, and much of what he said lodges in my mind to this day. I recently read some of him again, and found him as fresh, captivating and revelatory as when I was a boy. These are books, covering most of the concert repertoire, which you cannot put down if you love music.

Who was Tovey? He was born in 1875, the same year as Ravel; Tchaikovsky wrote his notorious first piano concerto and Bizet’s Carmen had its premiere; Rachmaninov was two years older, Casals a year his junior. Tovey came from Eton, son of a master at the school. He never went to school but was educated entirely by Sophie Weiss, a passionate musicologist and headmistress of a girls’ school, though he also had lessons in counterpoint from Sir Walter Parratt, organist at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He was composing systematically by the age of eight, and at 13 was thought promising enough to be taken up by Parry, whom he called ‘my master’.