Donald Tovey - String Quartet, Aria & Variations for String Quartet

Donald  TOVEY (1875-1940)
String Quartet , Aria & Variations for String Quartet

 TIPPETT QUARTET:
John Mills - violin, Jeremy Isaac - violin, Julia O’Riordan - viola, Bozidar Vukotic - cello



I’m pretty sure it was G. B. Shaw who said, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” In the case of Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940), perhaps the aphorism ought to read, “Not everyone who can, should.” Tovey wrote a considerable volume of music in his lifetime, mostly chamber works for various combinations of instruments, but also a symphony, concertos for cello and piano, an opera, and a handful of choral pieces. Some of it has been recorded once or twice, but none of it has ever garnered much interest.
A one-time composition student of Hubert Parry, Tovey was obviously capable of composing, but it’s probably kindest to say that his talents lay elsewhere. Those talents were formidable, for Tovey distinguished himself as a musicologist, musical analyst, aesthetician, academic, and indefatigable writer and lecturer on matters of musical form and harmony. He made a major contribution to articles on 18th- and 19th-century music in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and a collection of his program notes served as the basis for what is likely his most widely read publication, Essays in Musical Analysis. His love of Bach led him to produce a speculative completion to The Art of Fugue, and he devoted much time and effort to analyzing the works of two composers in particular, Beethoven and Brahms.
Tovey was especially fascinated by the subjects of tonality and musical form, believing that “classical music has an aesthetic that can be deduced from the internal evidence of the music itself” In this regard, Tovey’s philosophical ideas are closely related to those of the famous 19th-century music critic and aesthetician Eduard Hanslick, who believed that The Beautiful in Music (the title of his best-known publication) derived from its own inner logic and the fulfillment of its formal design. In other words, music has no meaning – at least not in any symbolic or emotional sense we impute to it – outside of realizing its own operative directives. Most of us, I think – readers, contributors, and living composers alike (except perhaps for the most radical of the avant-garde) – would find in this a not very satisfying explanation for our love of music. But it has long been one of the persistent lines of debate in the field of musical aesthetics.
This is not to suggest that Tovey’s compositional efforts are purely theoretical solutions to nonexistential abstractions. Stuck somewhere between Brahms and Parry, Tovey’s music can make for pleasant enough listening, though it seems to be quickly and easily forgotten.
The Air and Variations for String Quartet dates from 1900. No performance history exists until 1935, when it was taken up by the Busch Quartet for at least a couple of outings. The Air bears some resemblance to the opening of Brahms’s same-key Bb-Major String Sextet, op. 18, but Tovey’s undisturbed diatonic triadic theme, which introduces but a single Ab into the line, and then not until the second strain, has none of Brahms’s chromatic or rhythmic sophistication. Such a theme promises little in the way of fertile soil for development, yet Tovey doggedly spins 11 wearying variations over it for over 30 minutes of music that is never less than pretty but pointless and exhausting in a way that leaves this listener wishing the thing had ended before it started.
The G-Major String Quartet, op. 23, written in 1909, is the first in a pair of quartets Tovey wrote; its companion is the D Major, op. 24. It’s a bit more harmonically and rhythmically adventuresome than the Air and Variations and holds the interest for a moment or two longer, but four movements and 35 minutes later, I couldn’t recall a single idea from it that made a lasting impression on me.
Well, that’s not entirely true. There was one flourish that stuck with me, if only for its seeming incongruity, inaptness, and utter banality. At 50 seconds into the first movement, after a considerable amount of chromatic wandering about in a tonally vague soup, without any preparation, Tovey suddenly introduces a cadential, trumpet-like triadic fanfare that sounds like something straight out of a Gilbert and Sullivan military march. Even if it weren’t such a baldfaced cliche, it’s so out of context with what has gone before it that one can only wonder at its rhyme or reason. This sort of musical non sequitur underscores a point I’ve made in the past about a common deficiency among third-rate composers. No matter how inspired or memorable a musical idea may be-and there’s hardly anything inspired or memorable here to start with-if a composer has no idea how to follow up on it, if he is wanting in the art of continuation, his efforts can never produce a masterpiece.
Though Tovey’s string quartet was published by Schott in 1914, apparently no record exists of its ever having been performed. If I have learned anything from my years of music listening and study, it’s that there really is a difference between the analytical and the creative mind. For all his learning and profound knowledge gained from the analysis of the music of others, Tovey was not able to turn his keen analytical skills into a talent for composing.
Commendable, nonetheless, are the efforts of the Tippett Quartet for doing its best to salvage Tovey from his relative obscurity. The ensemble, formed in 1998, has thus far, on record at least, devoted its considerable talents to the music of 20th-century British composers, namely Bax, Bridge, Dodgson, Tippett, and now Tovey. Performances and recording are first-rate, and it’s unlikely that these works, which have lain fallow for so long, will be taken up anytime soon by others. So, cautiously recommended to the curious.
Jerry Dubins