Dr Reuben Phillips: Handling Tovey’s Bach
As a composer, scholar, performer and educator, Donald Francis Tovey’s (1875-1940) engagement with the works of J. S. Bach provided the impetus for some of his most remarkable feats of intellect and creativity. These included the production of a 55-page program note to accompany a performance of the Goldberg Variations in London in 1901, a continuo realization of the figured bass for the entirety of Bach’s Mass in B minor, and a hypothetical completion of the final fugue from Die Kunst der Fuge – the latter also recorded by Tovey in the 1930s at a time when his hands were wracked with pain from arthritis.
In this investigation I draw on methodologies of material history to ponder Tovey’s multi-facetted, loving and energetic engagement with Bach’s music by examining his personal copy of the Bach-Gesellschaft Edition held in the University of Edinburgh Library. Handsomely bound in green leather and stamped with Tovey’s initials, ‘D. F. T.’, almost every one of these fifty-three volumes carries copious pencil markings from its former owner. Tovey’s annotations mix scholarly acumen with witticism and wonderment, variously providing thoughts on performance practice, sharp-tongued complaints about idiotic editors, personal memories of past performances, and penetrating critical commentary. Inspired by approaches to the study of annotations pioneered by historians of the book (The Multigraph Collective 2018), I ask what it means to ‘hear’ Bach’s music through these markings, and consider more generally the experience of late nineteenth-century musicians attempting to comprehend Bach’s style through ‘bookish’ rather than aural encounters with his oeuvre.
Please click HERE to go to the online talk.