Empathy: Donald Francis Tovey
Robin Holloway, 8 August 2002
The name Donald Francis Tovey (always rather pompously in full) used to typify, before career musicology swept all before it, the broadly cultured rather than narrowly scholarly writer on music, sometimes browbeating and always unashamedly didactic, avid to improve his readers’ minds, popularising without condescension or dumbing down.
He had begun as a pianist of outstanding gifts in...