ABSTRACT

The musical life of Balliol constituted an extremely significant formative influence on the young Donald Francis Tovey, as it did on his older contemporary, Ernest Walker, while at the same time the growing musical life of the University fostered the pianism of Tovey, Walker and Paul Victor Mendelssohn Benecke. The chapter aims to set their individual talents and achievements against the background of the nurturing and enabling environment provided by Oxford's musical institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ernest Walker, too, functioned in both spheres prolifically. Among the high points of the Balliol concerts during Tovey's undergraduate years was the concert in March 1896 featuring Joseph Joachim, in which Ernest Walker and Harold Joachim, as well as Tovey, were involved. The audience on this occasion was the largest the reviewer remembered ever seeing in Balliol Hall.