[1] At the age of nine he won a place in the choir of New College, Oxford, in which there were 18 boys, two altos, four tenors and four basses, under the direction of Dr Hugh Allen.
In 1920 he accepted the post as an assistant vicar-choral at St Paul's Cathedral, which helped to support his continued studies and gave him a start as a professional singer until 1926.
He took part in a number of public performances during the early 1920s, but did not begin to make a permanent impression until he sang in Hubert Parry's oratorio Job, the role including the great dramatic passage of the Lamentations, at the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester in 1925.
The role of Job became one of the pinnacles of his art, and he attributed his success in it to the coaching he received from Harry Plunket Greene, whose pupil he became to lighten his tone after his term at St Paul's.
Plunket Greene was an inspiration to him for his unique interpretative powers, and made Falkner into one of the finest English singers of his day.
'[3] He attributed a lesser influence to lessons which he received intermittently as a very young man at Vienna and Salzburg from Theodore Lierhammer, from Ernst Grenzebach in Berlin, and from Dossert in Paris.
In April 1929 he first contributed to a Royal Philharmonic Society concert, singing Bach's aria Thou most blessed under Henry Wood.
[6] In December 1936 he sang with Olga Haley and Parry Jones in the RPS performance of Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette under Albert Wolff.
[13] The third was the film Thistledown (1938), playing Sir Ian Glenloch opposite Aino Bergö and Athole Stewart, in a dramatis personae which included the character of Gioachino Rossini.
In 1945, finding himself the Commanding Officer of a large RAF station, he was losing interest in just giving concerts and sought a more administrative role.
When the British Council ran out of money, Adrian Boult made contacts who arranged for him to open and develop the Voice Department at Cornell University in the United States, where he remained for ten years.
While working on his Four Last Songs, Ralph Vaughan Williams and his wife visited Falkner at Cornell, particularly interested in "Menelaus" and "Hands, Eyes and Heart"; in 1956 a first performance of the latter was given.