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Alan Tyson 1926–2000

If the name of Alan Tyson is not as well known to the general music lover as it ought to be, the respect with which he was held in musicological circles and his revolutionising of our understanding of the working methods of the Viennese classical masters are not in doubt.

Tyson’s specialism, to which he brought a fine and logical mind, trained in Mods and Greats at Oxford (where he later became a Fellow of All Souls), in psychoanalysis, and in medicine at University College Hospital, was the study, dating and authenticating of composers’ manuscripts, principally through an examination of paper stocks and watermarks. Through the rigour of his approach he was able to explode many of the myths and pieties which had accrued around the composing habits of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, not least the notion that composing came easily to them.

The enduring legacies of Tyson’s painstaking efforts were an exemplary edition of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, catalogues of Clementi works and Beethoven’s sketchbooks, an inventory of the watermarks in Mozart’s autograph manuscripts, and the several volumes of Beethoven studies which he edited, as well as a valuable collection of research materials, bequeathed to the Bodleian and the British libraries. Scholars working in his unglamorous yet vital field will be forever in his debt.

Alan Tyson: born 27 October 1926; died 10 November 2001.