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William Walton 1902–1983

by Christopher Palmer

Sir William Walton died in Ischia on 8 March; he was 80. Born at Oldham, Lancashire, at ten he entered the choir school at Christ Church, Oxford, where he later became an undergraduate and was encouraged by the Dean and by Sir Hugh Allen. In the end he left Oxford without a degree, but not before he had made a number of influential friends, notably Sacheverall Sitwell. For the next ten years Walton lived with the Sitwells on and off in Chelsea as a kind of adopted or elected brother; this valuably broadened his horizons through both exposure to other arts and European travel. Through the Sitwells, too, he met Constant Lambert, arguably the greatest single musical influence upon him (struck by Walton’s remarkable facial resemblance to Edith Sitwell, Lambert noised abroad the theory that his true parents were Sir George Sitwell and Dame Ethyl Smythe). The Sitwells also brought about the 1922 première of Façade, an entertainment originally devised for performance in their own drawing-room. Some years before, a piano quartet had been published under the auspices of the Carnegie Trust, but after Façade the overture of Portsmouth Point (1925) was more indicative of the true bent of Walton’s developing powers than the string quartet ‘full of undigested Bartók and Schoenberg’ which achieved performance at the 1923 ISCM Festival but was later withdrawn. More substantial were the Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra (1927), the Viola Concerto (1929) and Belshazzar’s Feast (1931); with the first he gained stature as a composer, with the second maturity, with the third popularity. His First Symphony (1935) is one of the finest in British music, but by the time the Violin Concerto appeared in 1939 Walton’s lyrico-dramatic talents had found a new outlet: film music. The three Olivier scores – Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III – are his most prestigious achievements in this genre. After the war (which, apart from many film scores, produced in 1940 only one major concert work, Scapino), Walton divided his time for a while between composing chamber music (the 1947 String Quartet and the 1949 Violin Sonata) and getting married and settling in Ischia – whence came the tendency to Meditteraneanize which informed most of his music from then on: the opera Troilus and Cressida (1954), the Johannesburg Festival Overture (1956), the Partita for Orchestra (1960), the Varii Capricci (1972), and many others. His life was uneventful for its last 20 years, although before illness took its toll he was a regular visitor to England or elsewhere either attending or participating in performances of his works.

The view that the bulk of Walton’s best work was done by the time he was 40 is, surely, no less valid for being popularly subscribed to. So often a creative artist’s middle years are critical: will he remain stationary or forge ahead? Walton in a sense did neither; instead he took a diversion (I use the word advisedly) and followed out in the second Symphony, the Cello Concerto and The Bear some of the implications of Façade. Some of these late scores have a glow about them; others (e.g. the Hindemith Variations and the Britten Improvisations) show a distinct gain in tautness, astringency and poetic elegance over the earlier period; and characteristics once noted by Herbert Howells in connection with the Sinfonia Concertante – the beauty that, in Walton’s expression, was ‘shot through with pathos’, the brilliance that for him was ‘hard, glittering, clean, rapier-thrusting’ – these remained constant to the end. One is anxious not to under-price late Walton; a passage in Tom Driberg’s autobiography Ruling Passions indicates that, for him, the first performance of The Twelve at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1965 was a moving artistic experience; ‘For this Auden/Walton anthem we sat; but it made us sit up. The sound was dynamic, almost violent: the words raced and leaped and tumbled, like rivers joining in a waterfall’. But the fact remains that fun and games (however witty and sophisticated), white suns and blue seas are essentially retirement or vacation-time amenities; they can never efface memories of the urgent ecstatic here-and-nowness, the joy of youth, the passion, pulse and power which fires and drives Belshazzar, the First Symphony, In Honour of the City of London, the Spitfire, the two Coronation Marches (the 1953 Orb and Sceptre is if possible even more resplendent than the 1937 Crown Imperial) and the Shakespeare scores. It seems that most of Walton’s most vital work was the product of some kind of pressure, tension or turmoil; it is significant that what may well come to be regarded as his masterpiece – the First Symphony – underwent a protracted and painful parturition during the most embattled decade of the century, namely the 1930s. No wonder he took so readily to the cinema: drama, inner or outer, is of the essence of his best music. A variety of factors – his growing acceptance as the foremost composer of his generation, the emotional security afforded by his marriage, the dolce far niente spirit of his chosen matrimonial retreat in Italy – all served to reduce not only sources of potential stress but also his will to compose. He was the most professional of craftsmen, a slow and hyper-selfcritical worker, but he never really enjoyed the labour of writing and was no doubt only too glad to see banished many of the demons that had driven him to perform it.

Walton was very much a loner, a ‘one-off’; in this he has many points of contact with Elgar and Delius. He had little formal instruction, held no official appointments, took little part in public musical life, taught no pupils, founded no school, neither spoke nor wrote much about his own or others’ music, theorized not at all, was a somewhat diffident (though highly effectual) conductor of his works, lived much out of England. In short, a private man who liked being fêted, but resisted most attempts to draw him out, particularly on the subject of his creative impulse (‘I spend most of my life rubbing out what I’ve written’). Yet on the purely musical level his public voice was of commanding magniloquence. His style was unproblematically compound of traditional English and contemporary European ingredients: yet right from the first it made a robustly attractive declaration of independence, asserted a whole that was more than the sum of its parts. When Walton makes a statement we have to listen, doubtless because we sense in what he says that basic life-enhancing quality which, consciously or unconsciously, we seek in all art. It is a sobering thought that with the deaths within weeks of one another of what seems like a Chosen Sacrificial Trinity – Boult, Howells and Walton – one of the longest and most glorious epochs in English music has come to an end.

Musical Times, May 1983