walton’s songs | www.waltonssongs.org

Home » walton’s songs

William Walton wrote solo songs throughout his life, from the lovely early Swinburne songs, written when he was only 16, through to the superb song cycle A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table, which he completed in his 60th year.

Walton’s songs thus offer a wonderful view of the broad sweep of his lifetime’s compositional activity. At the same time, they chart a clever and exciting path through 20th-century music, echoing at times with the touching romanticism of the English school, and at others with 1920s satire, the grandeur of film music, the brightness of modernism, and the beauty of the post-war neo-classical revival.

Throughout, however, these songs remain characteristically, resolutely, Walton. Begin your journey into Walton’s songs with these brief overviews, organised chronologically by publication group, below.

four early swinburne songs

Place & Poet

William Walton was a schoolboy and chorister at Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford when he wrote his first solo songs, which we now know as the “Four Swinburne Songs”, or alternately, the “Four Early Songs”. Each piece is a setting of a text by English poet, playwright and novelist Algernon Charles Swinburne, also an Oxford man, who was highly popular during Walton’s youth.

Swinburne’s poetry touches on traditional themes of love and loss, and features language and imagery inspired by Medieval Britain (a Victorian obsession), nostalgia, heroism, and the expression of quite penetrating human insight within deceptively simple poetic forms.

Swinburne was also a highly colourful public character. One of the “Decadent Poets”, he was public about his homosexuality, and as disdainful of the Victorian literary establishment as he was emotional and unapologetic about his nationalism (he identified strongly with his family homeland, Northumbria). It is no surprise, then, that the teenage Walton’s first solo song settings were stimulated by the moody and atmospheric poetry of this especially intreguing, eccentrically English, character.

Themes

The Four Swinburne songs focus on the youthful themes of love, adventure, and the sometimes fatal consequences of youth’s carefree overconfidence. “A Child’s Song”, asks the question “What is gold worth?”, answering, after some reflection on the true cost of time passing, “Gold is worth but gold;/ Love is worth love”. The second piece “Love Laid his Sleepless Head” (titled “Song” by Walton) is a clever ballad about the troubles experienced by the lover overnight, when worries, and with them life-breath, are drained, only to be restored with the coming of day. “A Lyke-Wake Song” recalls the famous Lyke-Wake dirge, a traditional English song about the soul’s sometimes troubled travel from its incarnation on earth to the reality beyond. In it Swinburne admonishes a youth “Fair of face, full of pride” who, one day, too, will “come to a grimly place” and will be gone and forgotten. The final song, “The Winds”, is a rousing seafaring song in which the brave lover conquers the waves to sail beyond for love.

Summary & More

The Four Early Swinburne songs translate popular English poetry into charming, generally easily singable, but nevertheless musically quite sophisticated, solo songs for voice and piano.

Read and hear more about these interesting and unusual songs on the Four Early Swinburne Songs song entry pages.

tritons

Place & Poet

Walton wrote the song “Tritons” in 1920 while still an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. A short but challenging song requiring a singer with an extended range and a strongly dramatic approach, it is no surprise that “Tritons” was one of the first pieces Walton published. The song cleverly fuses the rousing fantasy of its subject matter with strong writing in both the piano part and the vocal line. His bold musical voice and awareness of contemporary compositional developments are both abundantly in evidence here.

Walton took the text for “Tritons” from a poem by the 17th-century Scottish poet William Drummund of Hawthornden, a contemporary of Shakespeare and a man deeply immersed in both literary and political circles of his time. In 1605, Drummund became one of the first graduates of the newly founded University of Edinburgh, and his studies abroad (he studied law for a time in Paris) his trips to London at an early age (his father was a gentleman usher in the English court) and his extensive travels (especially France and Italy) strongly influenced his poetry and politics. Despite this worldliness, Drummond was a thoughtful and sensitive man who gave up law at first opportunity, dedicating himself to poetry upon becoming Laird of Hawthornden at the unusually early age of 24. He was also a sometime inventor, a great supporter of other writers, and a loyal subject of the crown, and wrote many verses, speeches and historical volumes supporting Charles I.

Themes

Drummond was known as the “Scottish Petrarch” for his strong interest in Italian themes and poetic forms. The poem “Tritons” is a case in point, since it, like many Italian poems, draws its inspiration from a figure from Greek mythology.

The “Triton” of the title is a sea-god, half-man and half fish, and the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, god and goddess of the sea. Trumpeting on his characteristic conch shell, Triton has the power to stir up the waves of the sea to great height or to calm them at his will. Triton is mentioned in the writings of all the key Greek writers, including Ovid and Homer. It is notable, especially in light of Walton’s song setting, that the sound of Triton’s conch shell was said to be so terrifying that it would frighten away even the fiercest giants.

Triton eventually gave birth to a race of children, the “Tritons” of Drummond’s title, who were both male and female, and who would form a group escort, travelling ahead of other marine divinities and trumpetting their arrival. Walton’s setting of Drummond’s poem captures all of the excitement, power and fear inspired by these great mythological creatures as they charge aggressively forward through the churning waves of the sea.

Summary & More

“Tritons” is an exciting and challenging song for both pianist and singer and is one of Walton’s most modernist solo songs. Quick, brilliant, and musically hugely impressive, it wonderfully captures the motion, strength, and power of these fearless gods of the sea.

Read and hear more about this exciting song on the Tritons song entry page.

songs from façade

Place & Poet

William Walton was living in a small attic room in the London house of his patrons, the infamous literary Sitwell siblings, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, when he first began sketching preliminary ideas for the work that was eventually to become Façade. In both its initial version for chamber ensemble and reciter, and the many subsequent versions, including the Three Songs for voice and piano of 1932 (Christopher Palmer later arranged three further songs from the original orchestral piece), Façade embodies a perfect musico-poetic marriage: that of Walton’s amusing and rhythmically vital music with Edith Sitwell’s satirical and hugely musical poems. Indeed, it can be said that Sitwell herself, who undertook extensive work with the 20-year old Walton to explain the complex sound-world of her Façade poems, is central to the vitality and longevity of Walton’s Façade settings.

Façade was designed to be a kind of artistic coming-of-age for 1920s London; its motivation came from the Sitwells’ interest in contemporary movements in art and literature, including Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, whose Rite of Spring, with music by Stravinsky, seemed to embody the modern age. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the first public performance of Façade in 1923 (like that of the Rite in 1913) caused the press to explode into a frenzy of emotional vitriol.

Subtitled “an entertainment” by Walton, Façade was deemed to be “a relentless cacophony” (Manchester Guardian), “naggingly memorable” (Daily Express) and “Drivel that we paid to hear”. The offending elements seemed to be the overt abstraction of Edith Sitwell’s poetry (it was written to explore word-rhythm and onomatopoeia and had no traditional narrative) and the unnecessarily theatrical manner of performance (the reciter was hidden and spoke through a sengerphone to create the illusion of a voice coming from the mouth of a fantastical face on a painted screen [above]). Even at the private première of the piece in 1922, which took place to invited guests in the Sitwells’ home, Walton was asked: “has a clarinet player ever done you an injury?” And yet, Façade remains one of Walton’s most popular scores.

Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) was throughout her life a literary, social and, through her artistic endeavours, a political character of note, whose works and personage drew admiration and derision in almost equal measure. An expert horticulturalist and a commercially successful writer of historical biographies and criticism as well as poetry, she was descended from the Plantagenets on her mother’s side, and her father was Sir George Reresby Sitwell, 6th Baronet and a conservative politician for Scarborough, who locked Edith in an iron cage as a girl to correct (unsuccessfully) curvature of the spine, had his wife thrown in jail, and died nearly penniless in Italy, where he had moved, among other reasons it is said, to escape British taxes. Edith and her brothers disliked both their parents, who were apparently very cruel to them during their childhood.

Edith was maverick in many of her leanings, and was derided in the press especially for her theatrical physicality; standing 6 feet tall (183 cm), with extremely angular features, she regularly wore glamorous, brocade and velvet gowns, heavy jewellery, and elaborate head-dresses. Nevertheless, her writing was of exceptionally high quality and her poetry, perhaps more than any of her contemporaries, successfully translated continental modernism in Britain between the wars. Her early poetry shows influence of the French Symbolist poets, and she had a special interest in the connection between poetry and music. She explored the rhythmic forms of popular music, in particular the jazz age, in many of her poems. No summary of Edith Sitwell’s person could be more apt than that of her own: “I am not eccentric. It is just that I am more alive than most people are. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish”. (Life magazine, 4 January 1963)

Themes

At first glance, the three Sitwell poems that Walton set in his Three Songs of 1932, like the further three arranged by Christopher Palmer, would seem to make no sense at all. However, understanding two key aspects of the poems makes their meaning spring to life: first, that they are very carefully constructed to showcase how word-rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and word-meaning can interact in unexpected and exciting ways in performance (the experience is rather like walking through a crowd and making music of the fragments of conversation one hears as one walks); and second, that the people, places, stories, and themes referred to in the poems are strongly contemporary, and would be recognised by all those hearing the poems at their London première.

Sitwell’s Façade poems may not “tell stories” in the traditional narrative sense, but they are, without a doubt, highly successful as cleverly constructed satirical “mash-ups” of the high and low culture of 1920s Britian.

Summary & More

William Walton’s Façade songs are bright, clever, humorous, satirical songs that perfectly encapsulate the carefree climate of experiment and irreverence that characterised 1920s Britain. Ranging from moderate to advanced difficulty, they are wonderfully theatrical and are an excellent vehicle for musical, vocal, and dramatic display for both singer and pianist.

Read and hear more about these brilliant, show-stopping songs on the Songs from Façade song entry page.