Ernest Walker (composer)

Ernest Walker (15 July 1870 – 21 February 1949) was an Indian-born English composer and writer on music, as well as a pianist, organist and teacher.

[2] He studied the piano with Ernst Pauer[1] and harmony with Alfred Richter (a son of the cantor at St Thomas's Church, Leipzig).

He arranged appearances at these concerts by artists such as the baritone Harry Plunket Greene, the tenors Steuart Wilson and Gervase Elwes, the pianists Fanny Davies, Leonard Borwick and Donald Tovey, the violinists Adolf Busch and Jelly d'Arányi, and the violist Lionel Tertis.

[1][2] These concerts often featured works then hardly known in England, such as César Franck's Violin Sonata in A major, and songs by Joseph Marx and Richard Strauss.

He encouraged many promising musicians, among them the Australian Frederick Septimus Kelly, who was killed in World War I, and Donald Tovey, who became his lifelong friend.

[2] He championed the music of Hugo Wolf and Claude Debussy, and introduced some of Johannes Brahms's late works to England (the piano pieces, Op.

[1] He also played for the first time in England some Scriabin and Debussy piano pieces, Max Reger's Aus meinem Tagebuch, and Sergei Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C sharp minor.

[2] Walker had a great reputation as an accompanist,[3] and played for artists such as Pablo Casals, on one occasion in 1898 performing together for Queen Victoria at Osborne House.

As late as 1947, Casals wrote to Walker expressing his admiration for the musicianship he had displayed almost 50 years earlier.

In 1996, the musicologist Paul Henry Lang wrote of it: A particular position must be assigned to Ernest Walker, the author of A History of Music in England (1907); stand-offish, wildly unjust and unforgiving, Walker's assertions are so sweeping and extravagant that it would be a waste of space to discuss them.

Sir Jack Westrup, in his new edition (1952), toned down the worst aspects of the work, but then it is no longer Walker.

[4]Walker's essays written over a 30-year period were collected in Free Thought and the Musician (1946), in which he explains his philosophical, religious and mystical views.

The majority of his music is written for voices – many choral pieces (partsongs, anthems and motets), songs, and vocal duets and quartets.

[11] His solo piano music consists mainly of short pieces, miniatures, album leaves, preludes and the like.

He arranged the Allegro assai from Felix Mendelssohn's String Quartet in F minor, for piano solo.

This was the Variations on an Original Theme for clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano left hand.

Some of his music has been recorded: the Cello Sonata;[13] the Adagio for Horn and Organ;[14] and some of his choral pieces.