String Quartet in A minor (Walton)

[4] But in September 1944, in response to an enquiry by Julian Herbage of the BBC's music department, Walton replied that a magnum opus was in preparation, in the form of a string quartet.

"[6] A year later, still working on the piece, he wrote to his publisher, Alan Frank of the Oxford University Press, "I've now completed nearly three movements and it is irritating that I shall have to start on the Lear music on my return at the end of next week.

[10] The critic Stephen Lloyd writes, "In hindsight one can only agree with Irving: the lento, deeply elegiac, is one of Walton's most tender outpourings".

[14] In his study of Walton's music, the critic Frank Howes writes that although the String Quartet caused the composer much difficulty in composition: The opening is a winding modal sixteen-bar melody for the viola, with a counter-melody for the second violin, taken up by the other two players.

Commentators have heard the movement differently: Parker writes of "a sense of obsession" resembling "Bartók at his most ferocious";[19] writing just after the premiere, Robin Hull commented on "a sinewy brilliance which acts as a light but well-chosen foil to the preceding Allegro";[20] for Neil Tierney it is "short and brilliantly witty, virile and alert ... which conjures up a fairy-dance atmosphere".

[21] The slow movement is in a clear sonata form in F major and it begins and ends on a chord of F. Its first subject is a long-breathed melody, and the second is introduced by a syncopated cello pizzicato followed by a viola solo.

The composer’s biographer Michael Kennedy has written, "the gem of the quartet is its dark third movement ... in which Walton achieves an emotional poise that testifies to his maturity as artist and man".

[22] Parker writes, "After some remarkably adventurous tonal wanderings, the final moments return to F major; in a beautiful coda, shards of the opening’s viola melody reappear; but perhaps peace is found at the last".

There is a central episode with an extended lyrical melody, characteristic of Walton, and developed into a canon in a way representative of the composer's liking for counterpoint.

[24] For Kennedy: In 1970, the conductor Neville Marriner asked Walton to write a new work for strings for his Academy of St Martin in the Fields.