His other major works of the 1920s and early 1930s, including the overture Portsmouth Point (1926), the Viola Concerto and the cantata, Belshazzar's Feast had established him as a prominent figure in British music.
Critics including Edward Greenfield have suggested that the problem was a reaction to the break-up of Walton's six-year love affair with a young German widow, the Baroness Imma von Doernberg, to whom the symphony is dedicated.
The composer had allowed the work to be announced for two consecutive years in the orchestra's seasonal prospectus, and the expectation thus aroused put pressure on him.
The News Chronicle reported, "The applause at the close was overwhelming, and when Mr Walton, a slim, shy, young man, came on to the platform he was cheered continuously for five minutes".
The commentator Keith Anderson observes that the movement has "a compelling unity" that has prompted comparisons with Sibelius, although Walton disagreed with such a view.
[15] The scherzo – "with malice" – in E minor, is in a fast 34 time, with occasional bars of rhythmically disruptive 54; over insistent rhythms, with percussive outbursts, angular off-beat fragmentary themes continue throughout, with no relaxed trio section to break the tension.
The tempo slows down for the return of the opening theme of the movement, forming what Burton describes as "a grandiloquent coda"[14] From the outset, critics remarked on Walton's debt to Sibelius in the symphony.
[18] Byron Adams says of the work that its "orgiastic power, coruscating malice, sensuous desolation and extroverted swagger" make the symphony a tribute to Walton's tenacity and inventive facility.
[1] The critic Edwin Evans wrote of the Andante con malinconia: The slow movement is in my opinion the nodal section of the work.
Its structure is melodic, its character idyllic and contemplative, but in an intimately personal way, with a feeling of melancholy and of craving expectancy which is wholly removed from the "yearning" of the Romantics.
[19][20] As to the work as a whole, in a 1998 study of the international symphonic repertoire, Michael Steinberg acknowledged the Sibelian influence, but added: For all that, Walton's Symphony No 1 is a free, strong, individual utterance, as far beyond mere imitation as, say, the Brahms First is in its relationship to Beethoven.