Tovey, Sir Donald Francis

Tovey, Sir Donald Francis

(tō`vē), 1875–1940, English pianist and musicologist, grad. Oxford, 1898. As a pianist he appeared in England and on the Continent after 1900 and in the United States in 1925 and 1927. He was professor of music (1914–40) at the Univ. of Edinburgh. Although he was an accomplished composer, he is best remembered for his analytical writings on music, which include Essays in Musical Analysis (7 vol., 1935–45), a collection of his program annotations; Musical Form and Matter (1934); A Companion to Beethoven's Pianoforte Sonatas (1931); and Beethoven (1944). He was adviser on music for the 14th edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica; many of his articles for this and previous editions were collected and published in 1945. Tovey edited Bach's Art of the Fugue and wrote (1932) a companion essay to it. He was knighted in 1935.