ESSAYS IN MUSICAL ANALYSIS
By D. F. Tovey
These two volumes (Oxford University Press, 10s. Bd.) are made up of a collection of notices written for the programmes of a series of orchestral concerts, mostly of classical sym- phonies and other orchestral works, though modern com- posers are represented as well. Most programme notices are intolerably superficial and impossible to read outside the concert hall ; these are fascinating. They must have fulfilled their original function of preparing the members of the audience for the works they were about to hear with remark- able success, and they will now send the reader straight to the gramophone to hear with increased understanding and appreciation the works which Sir Donald Tovey discusses. They are lucid in exegesis, scholarly, sensitive, sometimes amusingly satirical, and in the best sense creative. There are, of course, many occasions for disagreement, but to provoke a sensible disagreement is a virtue of criticism, and even where the reader's first impression is of a complete variance with Sir Donald's judgement he will generally find that honesty compels him to consider his own opinion more fully in the light of what Sir Donald says. It is extraordinarily difficult with a book like this to confine quotation to the necessary limits. What could be neater or more true than this : " Listen to Bruckner's music humbly : not with the humility with which you would hope to learn music from Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, but with the humility you would feel if.you over- heard a simple old soul talking to a child about sacred things. Bruckner's helplessness is not in itself a virtue, but to despise it is to miss the main lesson of the masters." These two volumes abound with passages as helpful as this. They cannot be missed by anyone genuinely interested in music, and they should be prescribed as obligatory reading for anyone who hopes to write a sensible programme-notice.
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