Customer Reviews

Beethoven (Oxford Paperbacks)

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It is not essential to agree with everything an extremely talented and sensitive teacher or critic has to say on a subject to gain a great deal from paying very close attention to what they have to say. What is required to honor a great teacher is that you work hard to formulate reasons supporting your disagreement rather than walking away with a simple wave of the hand.

Donald Francis Tovey was a very fine musician, a well thought of composer in his time, and an extremely talented critic and writer on music. What is exceptional is that he was able to write about music in a way that was informative for the general reader and still instructive for the trained musician. This book was an unfinished typescript that was found when he died at 65 in 1940. Yes, it would have benefited from his revisions and the article on Fugue ends in mid-sentence, but what is here is quite wonderful.

He does not give us a biography of Beethoven, but does take the composer's work, topic by topic, to illustrate what the art of the work was all about. Tovey shows us why Beethoven was so important and makes a great case for his claim that "Beethoven is a complete artist. If the term is rightly understood, he is one of the completest that ever lived."

Tovey takes on some of the claims against the composer; that he was not advanced harmonically, that he could not write a fugue, that he was uninventive melodically, and more. He turns all the criticisms away and takes us through a series of essays on the materials of Beethoven's language, his large scaled tonality, his dramatic ability to cause surprise and how he pulls it off. Tovey's chapters on how Beethoven used rhythm & movement, phrasing & accent, and how he made art forms are very instructive for listening to all classical music as well as Beethoven. The last three complete chapters on how Beethoven used development in his sonata forms is fabulous. The discussion of rondo and sectional forms is particularly instructive, and the final chapter on variation form gets to the heart of Beethoven's art. The chapter on fugue is just begun and cuts off and left unfinished.

One of the great things about Tovey's analysis is the way he insists on what a listener actually hears. Not what some rare person with perfect hearing and memory might hear, but what you and I and anyone sensitive to music would hear by taking some care and attention. He criticizes pedantic books and teachers who trap themselves by looking at the score and seeing things that really aren't there for the hearing. Very instructive stuff, I believe.

So, I recommend this to anyone interested in learning more about Beethoven, but also about listening to music as art and understanding how to do so and why it is important.