Craig A Comen

While the writings of Donald Francis Tovey have been celebrated for their sensitive treatment of the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, their methodology has evaded systematic reconstruction. This study argues that at the heart of Tovey’s critical oeuvre there lies a coherent framework, one indebted to the philosophy of German idealism. First, Tovey embeds himself in its aesthetic tradition by articulating a claim about what it means for music to be modern, most evident in his essay ‘Haydn’s Chamber Music’, where he presents the composer as responsible for initiating what he calls the ‘Copernican revolution’ of the ‘sonata style’. Second, Tovey’s analytical approaches rely on Hegelian dialectical thinking. A prime example is found in his early essay on Haydn’s E flat keyboard sonata, in which he elaborates his conception of the sonata style and presents a sophisticated method to analyse the music of Haydn and his successors.

Around 1800 a group of critics worried that new music was in danger of losing its social relevance. In their eyes music had become severed from the religious practices which had formerly provided its purpose and now exhibited a mercurial style that threatened its intelligibility, leading to a host of anxieties about its role in the contemporary world. This article argues that these concerns form the basis of an elegiac discourse of musical modernity, one resonating with broader philosophical concerns of the period. Taking Hoffmann's ' Alte und neue Kirchenmusik' as the central text, my narrative explores how he and others sought to rehabilitate modern music in the wake of a perceived social upheaval. This rehabilitation chiefly occurred at the hands of critics, who approached the complexities of new musical works by attempting to elucidate them through analysis. Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony belongs in this narrative as a characteristic attempt to secure new music's meaning.