Walter J. Turner

Walter James Redfern Turner (13 October 1889[1] – 18 November 1946) was an Australian-born, English-domiciled writer and critic.

[2] Born in South Melbourne, the son of a church musician – organist at St Paul's Cathedral – and warehouseman, Walter James Turner, and Alice May (née Watson), he was educated at Carlton State School, Scotch College and the Working Men's College.

[2] There he met and befriended a number of literary intellectual figures, including Siegfried Sassoon, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and Lady Ottoline Morrell (the caricature of her in his book The Aesthetes ended their friendship).

But today, although Turner produced several novels and plays, as well as books of poems, his reputation rests on his biographies of the composers Mozart, Beethoven and Berlioz.

[5] Notoriously, on the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Wagner's death, he wrote: “I can confidently and in soberness declare that Wagner is a colossal fraud.”[6] Turner was a close friend of the pianist Artur Schnabel, about whom he frequently wrote, and with whom he frequently went hiking.