David Kimbell – författare

For much of the twentieth century, Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940) was Britain's most celebrated and influential writer on music, largely as a result of the considerable corpus of his work published by Oxford University Press in the 1930s and posthumously in the 1940s. However, as a prolific and popular lecturer, broadcaster, and essayist, he left many scattered writings which the Press did not publish in those years. With the sole exceptions of the Bach and Beethoven commentaries written for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, The Classics of Music assembles here for the first time all the significant completed public writings of Tovey which have not appeared heretofore under the Oxford imprint. Initially edited by Michael Tilmouth, late Tovey Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh, the volume has been completed by David Kimbell and Roger Savage, also of Edinburgh - the institution at which Tovey himself held the Reid Chair of Music from 1914. Here, then, are over seventy essays in musical analysis; fifteen composer-articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica; two complete lecture series (one of them a sophisticated exploration of key-relationships in Beethoven); a sequence of radio talks for the ordinary listener; a survey of German music from the Renaissance to Hugo Wolf; and two dozen other essays, papers, scholarly reviews, and affectionate obituaries. All new Tovey - and all characteristically stimulating and stylish - making this essential collection available to a new generation of musicians.

Of all the great composers of the eighteenth century, Handel was the supreme cosmopolitan, an early and extraordinarily successful example of a freelance composer. For thirty years the opera-house was the principal focus of his creative work and he composed more than forty operas over this period. In this book, David Kimbell sets Handel's operas in their biographical and cultural contexts. He explores the circumstances in which they were composed and performed, the librettos that were prepared for Handel, and what they tell us about his and his audience's values and the music he composed for them. Remarkably no Handel operas were staged for a period of 170 years between 1754 and the 1920s. The final chapter in this book reveals the differences and similarities between how Handel's operas were performed in his time and ours.