William Walton

British composer

• Born: March 29, 1902
• Birthplace: Oldham, Lancashire, England
• Died: March 8, 1983
• Place of death: Ischia, Italy

In the field of concert music, Walton created a small but remarkably effective group of masterpieces, heard throughout the world in public performances and by means of recordings. A wider public has heard his church music, his stirring ceremonial music, and his scores for radio and film the latter including Sir Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, Henry V, and Richard III.

Early Life

Like so many who have excelled in the field of music, William Walton had musical parents: Charles, a choirmaster and teacher of singing, and Elizabeth, who played and taught piano. The composer was the second of their four children. Though introduced to piano and violin at an early age, Walton was no instrumental prodigy; only his outstanding ability as a boy soprano suggested musical gifts.

Through the persistence of his mother, the ten-year-old Walton auditioned successfully for a place in the choir school of Christ Church College, Oxford. By the time his voice had changed he had started on his lifetime career of musical composition; at sixteen, he published an anthem for four-part chorus, titled “A Litany.” While not in the style of his most famous works, it is an excellent piece. Like so many of Walton’s works, it has been recorded more than once, and it remains in the repertoire of many church, cathedral, and school choirs.

Admitted to Christ Church College as a regular undergraduate, Walton completed the next of his works to be published, a piano quartet. By this time he had the full support of the Reverend Thomas Banks Strong, dean of the college and later bishop of Oxford. He neglected all but his musical studies, which he pursued under the wise and liberal guidance of Dr. Hugh Allen. When Allen became director of the Royal College of Music in 1919, Walton would normally have followed him there. Walton, however, disappointed his family and former teachers by leaving school altogether at age eighteen. He accepted the uniquely generous offer of patronage from his recently acquired friends Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, who, with their sister Edith, constituted a veritable modernist movement in poetry and the arts. Walton lived as a member of that eccentric family from 1920 until 1934. Through the Sitwells Walton met most of the leading personalities in British arts and letters and many distinguished foreigners as well; they regularly took him along on their extensive trips to Spain and Italy, where their father, Sir George, owned an ancient castle. The circumstance was decisive in shaping Walton’s career: Edith and Osbert Sitwell were collaborators on two of the early masterpieces that established him as a major composer, and he was so enchanted with southern Italy that years later, when circumstances permitted, he made it his permanent home.

As a young man, Walton was spare of build, somewhat below medium height, and quite handsome his features suggested both strength and sensitivity. Though often in the company of brilliant and exhibitionistic people, he was himself almost, but not quite, taciturn. Throughout his life, Walton had a sharp and original wit, expressed in brief and pungent sayings.

Life’s Work

Walton’s next two works were far from being instant successes. He collaborated with Edith Sitwell in composing Façade (1923). Osbert and Sacheverell were also helpful, as was a brilliant young student from the Royal College of Music, Constant Lambert (1905-1951), who had recently entered the Sitwell circle. Façade puzzled the guests who heard it first, in a private production at the Sitwell’s house in Chelsea, and also failed to attract favorable notice in its first public performance in June, 1923. Walton’s aggressively modern and dissonant string quartet similarly failed to make a great impression at the first Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Salzburg. Yet Façade, after much reworking, was a triumph in 1926, and has remained one of the most popular of modern pieces ever since. Modeled both on Arnold Schönberg’s revolutionary Pierrot Lunaire, op. 21 (1912) and the collaborative work by Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie, Parade (1917), Façade consisted of short poems, read rapidly through a megaphone whose bell formed the mouth of a comic face on a large screen. Speaker and instrumentalists were concealed behind the screen; this odd presentation and the use of words for sound and whimsy rather than sense made the experience unusually abstract and disorienting; Walton’s music, influenced by popular tunes and Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale (1918), was both novel and yet familiar to self-consciously modern Londoners of the mid-1920’s. The string quartet, on the other hand, enjoyed no such redemption. Walton abandoned it; even so, his trip to Salzburg had introduced him to leading composers from all over the world, and he began an association with Paul Hindemith, who a few years later gave the premiere performance of Walton’s Viola Concerto.

For the next several years, the most important influence on Walton seems to have been Constant Lambert. The two were close friends and had much in common: precocious musical gifts, a keen sense of humor, and sympathies that embraced French, Italian, and Russian music rather than German. There were striking differences as well: Lambert, however gifted as composer, had formidable gifts as artist, raconteur, critic, essayist, and finally conductor; unfortunately, he also had a self-destructive bent toward dissipation. The reticent and craftsmanlike Walton kept his good health and concentrated his creative energies on composition. Lambert, never entirely healthy, worked feverishly to make the Sadler’s Wells Ballet one of the best in the world, giving it not only the finest in musical direction but also helping in all other aspects of performance and production incidentally advancing the music of his contemporaries while neglecting his own talent for composition. Most of these events were still in the future when the two prodigies, still in their early twenties, most enjoyed each other’s company. Through Lambert, Walton became acquainted with Cecil Gray and Philip Heseltine, both of whom combined probing critical faculties with unconventional morals. Heseltine was especially gifted, published his music under the pseudonym Peter Warlock. Finally there was Gerald, fourteenth Lord Berners, who enjoyed success as a diplomat, painter, composer, novelist, and persistent practical joker. Among such people there was much frivolity and cynicism, but there was also a profound respect for the arts in general, and an approach to music that was original and exciting. One can savor it in Lambert’s Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (1934). Original and captivating in argument, Music Ho! builds on the earlier iconoclastic writings of Gray, and like Gray finds hope for the modern composer precisely to the extent that he does not join a cult or school, or even attempt self-consciously to be modern. Jean Sibelius was put forth (with good reason) as the exemplary composer content to go his own way in defiance of fads and trends. However, Sibelius, though one could not yet be sure, had by 1934 essentially completed his life’s work. If one reads Music Ho! carefully, one finds that the only young composer mentioned both frequently and favorably is William Walton.

By that time, Walton had enjoyed immense success with the Viola Concerto, first performed in October, 1929, with Hindemith as soloist and Walton himself, after lessons from Eugene Goossens, conducting. This was the wider public’s first experience of Walton’s extraordinary gift for long and heart-tugging melody. Lionel Tertis, England’s foremost violist, had declined to perform the work, but after attending the premiere changed his mind and subsequently played it many times.

The oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast , for which Osbert Sitwell had arranged passages from the Old Testament and from the Revelation of St. John, caused a still greater stir in 1931. The English oratorio tradition was never so shallow musically or spiritually as its enemies have contended, but nothing in it even masterpieces such as George Frideric Handel’s Israel in Egypt (1739) or Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah (1846) could rival Walton’s music for expressing the bitter sorrow of Israel in the Babylonian captivity, the pagan rites and revels within the “mighty city,” or the triumphant and vengeful songs of Israel after Babylon’s destruction. With double chorus, a single baritone soloist serving as narrator, a huge battery of percussion and an extra brass band, the oratorio also offered a new and exciting range of sounds. Teeming with dissonance and complex rhythms, Belshazzar’s Feast nevertheless has a firm and clear sequence of tonalities, and for all its novelty made an immediate impression on the experienced concertgoers of England.

With Façade, the Viola Concerto, and Belshazzar’s Feast all established as contemporary classics, Walton sealed his reputation in 1935 with his long and powerful First Symphony. So important had Walton become in English musical life that the great conductor Sir Hamilton Harty premiered the first three movements of the work before Walton had completed the finale; Harty also conducted a recording of the work shortly after the first public performance of the completed score. The last of Walton’s serious works to become a “standard classic” was the Violin Concerto, commissioned by Jascha Heifetz, and premiered by that brilliant violinist with the New York Philharmonic in December, 1939. A recording by Heifetz and the Cincinnati Symphony under Eugene Goossens followed immediately.

During most of his career Walton was remarkable for the care he lavished on each composition, even disappointing some of his partisans by the relatively small number of works actually brought to performance and publication. The years from 1934 to about 1954, however, saw the composer rushing a variety of works to completion, almost always by invitation or commission. When necessary Walton could complete a score as quickly as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Handel. One of his commissions came all the way from Illinois, where Frederick Stock conducted the high-spirited Scapino Overture while celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1941. Many scores were for plays and films. In total, Walton composed music for fourteen films, including the celebrated Shakespearean works mentioned above, and the classic Major Barbara (1941) with Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison. An opening sequence from the World War II film The First of the Few (1942) became independently famous as Spitfire Prelude and Fugue. In the tradition of Edward Elgar, Walton composed grand symphonic marches: Crown Imperial for the coronation of George VI in 1936 and Orb and Sceptre for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. For the latter he also composed the Coronation te Deum for large chorus and orchestra. He arranged several pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, selected by Lambert, into music for the ballet The Wise Virgins (1940) and composed an original score for the ballet The Quest (1943). Returning to classical forms after the war, Walton completed his String Quartet in A Minor in 1947, his Sonata for Violin and Piano, commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin, in 1949, and his grand opera Troilus and Cressida in 1954. That much of this music was more facile than original, and some of it traditionally patriotic, led Lambert to refer to his gifted friend as “the late Sir William Walton” several years before Walton, alive and healthy, received the honor of knighthood in 1951.

Walton’s personal life changed greatly during these years. He left Osbert Sitwell’s house in 1934, to be sustained for the next few years by Lady Alice Wimbush. In 1948, Walton attended a conference in Buenos Aires where he met and courted Susana Gil. They were married in December and made their permanent home on the Italian island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. This was not an early retirement: Walton continued to compose, but after Troilus and Cressida he attempted no more works on the grand scale and wrote relatively little occasional or incidental music. Though living far from the musical world he had so effectively conquered, Walton returned to England frequently to conduct concerts and recordings of his own music, to consult with collaborators on new works, and to negotiate with his publisher, Oxford University Press. He also traveled to such remote but musical places as the United States, Australia, and the Soviet Union.

At home on Ischia he helped his wife develop a luxurious tropical garden and assisted her in building and maintaining several houses, which became a resort for friends and acquaintances as well as a source of income. Ralph and Ursula Vaughan Williams took one of those houses in January, 1958; the older composer was then eighty-five and in need of a vacation from his still-busy career. Ursula reminisces, “Everything had been done for us with imagination and practicality, there was food in the larder, and spring flowers in the sitting-room and bedroom. William was going to England so he very kindly lent Ralph his piano.” Indeed, Walton personally supervised the moving of that piano, rolling it into the parlor just as a terrific storm broke.

Walton’s later works have been less popular than the series of masterpieces that began with Façade and ended with the Violin Concerto, but they have hardly suffered neglect. In 1956 he completed a Cello Concerto for Gregor Piatagorsky. This work was followed by several excellent works for orchestra: Johannesburg Festival Overture (1956), Partita for Orchestra (1958), Symphony no. 2 (1960), Variations on a Theme of Hindemith (1963), and Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten (1970). With texts supplied by Christopher Hassall (1912-1962), his gifted librettist for Troilus and Cressida, Walton composed two elegant song cycles: Anon. in Love (1960) for tenor with guitar accompaniment, and A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table (1962). The Twelve (1965), an anthem with words by W. H. Auden, was one of several choral works; The Bear (1967), a one-act chamber opera adapted from a play by Anton Chekhov, again displayed Walton’s talent for comedy.

Significance

In June, 1982, Walton attended a concert in London at which Mstislav Rostropovich performed Walton’s Passacaglia for solo cello. The audience turned to Walton’s box and gave him a standing ovation. The enfant terrible of 1922 had become a figure as popular and beloved as Elgar in his latter years. Along the way he had received honorary doctorates from Oxford (1942) and other universities, the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society (presented by Williams at a concert in 1947), royal appointment to the Order of Merit (1967), and the American Benjamin Franklin Medal (1972). Walton had made his presence felt in every aspect of English musical life: in opera and song, symphony and concerto, art song and anthem, swaggering march and thrilling film score. If the output was small compared to a Williams or a Britten, it was still ample, memorable, and moving. Walton’s music was performed all over the world during his eightieth anniversary year; since his death in early 1983, new performances and recordings have continued to pour forth. Combining the best in traditional musical language with an unmistakably modern touch, Walton has appealed to almost all sects within the world of music.

Bibliography

Howes, Frank. The Music of William Walton. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Brief as to the life, but outstanding on the music.

Lambert, Constant. Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline. London: Faber & Faber, 1934. A wonderful book in its own right, it is indispensable for reconstructing the musical ideals of Walton’s early years.

Lloyd, Stephen. William Walton: Muse of Fire. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2001. Examines Walton’s life and work through contemporary correspondence, articles, and interviews.

Motion, Andrew. The Lamberts: George, Constant, and Kit. London: Chatto and Windus, 1986. The exciting and tragic story of three generations of creative Lamberts. A good source for Walton’s years in London.

Ottoway, Hugh. “Sir William Walton.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Vol. 20. London: Macmillan, 1980. An excellent short musical biography, with a comprehensive catalog of works and a bibliography especially strong in journal articles.

Pearson, John. The Sitwells: A Family’s Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. Walton contributed extensive reminiscences to this large and rich biography of his three friends and patrons, published in England as Façades.

Shead, Richard. Constant Lambert. With a memoir by Anthony Powell. London: Simon, 1973. This work has more details on the friendship of Lambert and Walton than Motion’s wider-ranging book.

Sitwell, Sir Osbert. Laughter in the Next Room: Being the Fourth Volume of Left Hand, Right Hand! An Autobiography. London: Macmillan, 1949. Not the most objective of authors, Sitwell was nevertheless a sharp observer and a trenchant writer. This volume covers the years of the Sitwells’ close association with Walton.

Walton, William. The Selected Letters of William Walton. Edited by Malcolm Hayes. London: Faber, 2002. Walton was a prolific letter writer and his letters provide a self-portrait, offering details about his life, love affairs, and the creation of his musical compositions.