The eminent English music scholar, pianist, and composer, Sir Donald (Francis) Tovey, began to study the piano and compose at an early age. He studied privately with Sophie Weisse (piano), Parratt (counterpoint), and James Higgs and Hubert Parry (composition) until 1894, when he won the Nettleship scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford; graduated with Classical Honours (BA, 1898).

Tovey was most widely known as a writer and lecturer on music, his analytical essays being models of their kind. In his essays, Tovey developed a theory of tonal structure and its relation to classical forms that he applied in his descriptions of pieces in his famous program notes for the Reid Orchestra. His aesthetic regards works of music as organic wholes, and he stresses the importance of understanding how musical principles manifest in different ways within the context of a given piece. He was fond of using metaphors to illustrate his ideas. A quotation from the Essays (on J. Brahms' Handel Variations, Tovey 1922):"The relation between Beethoven's freest variations and his theme is of the same order of microscopical accuracy and profundity as the relation of a bat's wing to a human hand." Tovey's belief that classical music has an aesthetics that can be deduced from the internal evidence of the music itself has influenced subsequent writers on music.

Best-known for his Essays in Musical Analysis which he based on his famous program notes written mainly for his concerts with the Reid Orchestra in Edinburgh, Sir Donald Tovey achieved world-wide recognition as a pianist, composer, conductor, and writer on music. Originally published as six volumes from 1935-39, Essays in Musical Analysis reappeared in 1981 as two paperback volumes, Symphonies and Other Orchestral Works and Concertos and Choral Works, along with a supplementary volume, Chamber Music.

Chamber Music contains some of Tovey's most important essays, including those on Bach's "Goldberg" Variations and Art of Fugue, and on key works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms.

But Tovey regarded himself first and foremost as a musician: making music was the real business of his life; everything else was secondary. Yet he was not content to be a pianist, conductor and composer; as an editor, writer, broadcaster, scholar and teacher, his aim was to bring his knowledge and love of music to a much wider audience.