There’s a lot in this chap. You must keep an eye on him!

 

- Sir Hubert Parry

 

William Walton is one of the three indisputable leaders of the first generation of 20th century British composers, together with Michael Tippett (three years younger) and Benjamin Britten (eleven years younger). Their immediate musical forbears were Vaughan Williams (b 1872) and Holst (b 1874) and all were contemporary with Edward Elgar (b 1857) who lived until 1934. Of these illustrious names, Walton was the closest in style and temperament to Elgar and his personal background was remarkably similar. Both were born in provincial towns to lower middle class parents and both had no formal musical education at a college or academy. But Walton achieved fame earlier in his life.

William Turner Walton was born on 29 March 1902 at 93, Werneth Hall Road, Oldham, Lancashire. His father Charles Walton had been one of the first intake in 1893 at the new Royal Manchester College of Music, where he was a bass-baritone pupil of Andrew Black, who, five years later, was to create the title-part in Elgar’s Caractacus. Charles became organist and choirmaster at St John’s Church, Werneth, for 21 years and also taught singing and the organ elsewhere. His wife, Louisa Maria Turner, was a good amateur contralto. William and his elder brother sang in the St John’s Choir. William also learned to play the piano and (for a brief time) the violin. His musical talent was obvious and when he was ten he was entered for a voice trial for probationer choristers at Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford. Although he arrived late because of a missed train, his mother pleaded for him to be heard and the organist, Dr H.G.Ley, accepted him after he sang Marcello’s ‘O Lord Our Governor’. So William exchanged the ‘nightmare’ of a board school in Oldham for an Oxford boarding-school where his first term was made ‘odious’ for him because of his Lancashire accent, which he later learned to conceal (although never entirely).

Walton was at the choir school from 1912 to 1918. When war was declared in 1914, Charles Walton’s singing pupils declined in number and William would

have been brought home to become an office-boy or to work as a clerk in a cotton-mill if Dr Thomas Strong, Dean of Christ Church, had not himself paid the balance of the school fees not met by the scholarship. Dr. Strong was a firm believer in the boy’s talent. Walton was by then composing anthems and songs, some of which Strong showed to Sir Hubert Parry who remarked: ‘There’s a lot in this chap, you must keep an eye on him!’ Walton’s version of why he started composing was ‘I must make myself interesting somehow or when my voice breaks, I’ll be sent home to Oldham’. His musical education at Oxford was supervised by Hugh Allen, then organist of New College and later professor of music at Oxford University and Director of the Royal College of Music. Through Allen and Strong he was introduced to the music of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ravel, Debussy and Prokofiev, the avant-garde of the time. He passed the first half of his Bachelor of Music exam in June 1918, but failed the exam called Responsions at three attempts in 1919. He passed the second part of his B. Mus. in June 1920 (and received the honorary degree of Doctor of Music in 1941). His musical education had continued in the holidays at Oldham: his father took him to Hallé concerts in Manchester and he attended performances of Sir Thomas Beecham’s famous opera seasons in Manchester in 1916 and 1917.

In 1918, at the age of sixteen, Walton began to compose a Piano Quartet, his first large-scale composition. This work caught the attention of another undergraduate at Oxford, Sacheverell Sitwell, who insisted that his older brother Osbert should come to Oxford to encounter a ‘genius’. After he had failed his exams, Walton said to Sacheverell: ‘What the hell am I going to do?’ The reply was ‘Why not come to stay with us?’ The Sitwell brothers, with their sister Edith, were intellectual aesthetes who were just beginning to make a flamboyant impact on literary circles in London. Walton went to stay in London for a few weeks – which turned into several years. They more or less adopted him and, with Dr Strong, the composer Lord Berners and the poet Siegfried Sassoon, guaranteed him an annual income to enable him to devote all his time to composition and never to have to fear return to Oldham.

The Sitwells introduced Walton to a milieu he could never have imagined – to Busoni, Lady Ottoline Morrell, T.S.Eliot and Ernest Ansermet. They took him to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, to jazz, to concerts of contemporary music and, most significant of all, to Italy, with which he fell in love at first sight. The first fruit of his co-habitation with the Sitwells was Façade, an ‘entertainment’ in which eighteen of Edith’s poems were recited over a background of Walton’s music scored for five instrumentalists. The work was first performed privately in January 1922 and publicly in 1923, when it caused something of a furore mainly because of the method of presentation – the poems were declaimed through a megaphone thrust through a painted curtain. By 1926 the work was the talk of the town. Walton continued to revise it, adding and subtracting items. In addition to setting three sections from Façade as solo songs in 1931-32, he made two Orchestral Suites, which were used for ballet, and did not settle on a definitive version of 21 items until 1951, when it was at last published. It was a nineteen-year old’s work of genius, original and, as it proved, inimitable.

 

The Piano Quartet was completed in 1921, and a string quartet was selected for the International Society for Contemporary Music’s festival in Salzburg in 1923, which caught the attention of Alban Berg. In the early 1920’s Walton wrote arrangements of foxtrots for Debroy Somers’s band at the Savoy Hotel. He met Gershwin in 1925, at about the time he began to compose his rumbustious overture Portsmouth Point. His next important work was a Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra, each movement being dedicated to one of the Sitwells. It was overshadowed by its successor, the Viola Concerto of 1928-9 (considered by many to be Walton’s masterpiece) the first performance of which was given at a Promenade Concert in 1929 by Paul Hindemith. With this great work, Walton at the age of 27, was in the forefront of English composers of his generation. The cantata Belshazzar’s Feast, introduced at the 1931 Leeds Festival, confirmed this position. Originally commissioned by the BBC, and written in Amalfi and at Ascona, Switzerland, where Walton was living with a German baroness, Imma von Doernberg, Belshazzar’s Feast was almost unanimously acclaimed as the most important English choral work since Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.

It was while writing a symphony for the Hallé Orchestra in 1934 that his relationship with Imma ended and he became involved with Viscountess Wimborne, 22 years older than he and one of London’s society hostesses (she organised private concerts at her London home). This emotional crisis delayed the symphony, as did his acceptance of a lucrative commission to write music for the film Escape Me Never. The Finale of the Symphony (eventually completed in 1935) is an example of Walton in his most ceremonial manner, its closing pages a marvellously exhilarating exordium. Not surprisingly, the march he wrote for King George VI’s Coronation in 1937, Crown Imperial, is a by-product of this style. There followed in 1939 a Violin Concerto, commissioned and premiered by Jascha Heifetz. This is in many ways the most beautiful work Walton wrote, suffused with the happiness he had found with Alice Wimbourne.

Walton’s ‘war work’ was to write music for propaganda films, which he did with outstanding success, as in The First of the Few (about the designer of the Spitfire fighter aircraft) and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. But after the war, the climate of British music was changed. Benjamin Britten had composed a succession of fine works, culminating in 1945 in the opera Peter Grimes, making Walton appear to some to be a figure from the past. But in 1947 the BBC commissioned an opera from him on the subject of Troilus and Cressida (Chaucer’s version). Before he composed a note of it, Alice Wimbourne died in April 1948. Later that year, while in Buenos Aires, he met and married Susana Gil Passo, who was 24 years his junior. They settled on the island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples, where in the grounds of their house, La Mortella, Susana

Walton created one of the most wonderful gardens in the world.

Troilus and Cressida was performed at Covent Garden in 1954 to a respectful rather than ecstatic reception. The pendulum had swung away from romanticism to the newer operatic styles of Britten and Tippett. Walton, who had received a knighthood in 1951, had nevertheless been first choice for another Coronation march (Orb and Sceptre) for Elizabeth I in 1953 and for a Te Deum. Acclaim in America in the 1960s led to a commission from Gregor Piatigorsky for the Cello Concerto (1955-6). This was followed by the one-act comic opera The Bear, the delightful song cycles Anon in Love, and A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table, the Variations on a Theme of Hindemith and the Improvisations on an Impromptu by Benjamin Britten. The times were out of joint, however. For critics who savoured the avant-garde, Walton was no longer of any interest.

Walton was hurt by this, jealous of the success Britten and Tippett enjoyed. Some believed that his absence in Ischia contributed towards his sidelining. Britten was on the spot to promote his works, Walton was a kind of exile. Some consolation, however, must have been provided by his receiving the prestigious award, bestowed on him by The Queen, of the Order of Merit in 1967. His 75th and 80th birthday concerts in London were illustrious events which can have left him in no doubt that he was regarded as one of the great men of British music. William Walton died in Ischia three weeks before his 81st birthday.

This text is excerpted from “Walton – A Celebration – 2002″, written by Michael Kennedy and published by the William Walton Trust, March 2000.

Credits:

Photo slider A: Photos 1-4, 6: Source William Walton Trust; Photo 1: WW portrait; Photo 2: WW composing; Photo 3: WW conducting; Photo 4: Sir William and Lady Walton; Photo 5: Sir William Turner Walton, by Michael Ayreton (credit: Kathryn Whitney) from the painting in Walton’s house at La Mortella; Photo 6: Walton in Australia; Photo 7: WW signatures (credit: Kathryn Whitney) from the William Walton Archive, La Mortella.

Photo slider B: Source (all): William Walton Archive, La Mortella. Photo credit (all): Kathryn Whitney. Letter 1: WW to his mother, 8/10/1916 (excerpt) ;Letter 2: Edward Peake, Dean of Christ Church Cathedral School, to WW’s father, 27/12/1916; Letter 3: WW to Benjamin Britten, 21/06/1945 (excerpt); Peter Pears to WW from Aldeburgh, no date (excerpt); Cathy Berberian to WW (excerpt), no date; WW to mother, 11/03/1919 (excerpt).