William Walton
His best-known works include Façade, the cantata Belshazzar's Feast, the Viola Concerto, the First Symphony, and the British coronation marches Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre.
He was more successful as a singer:[2] he and his elder brother sang in their father's choir, taking part in performances of large-scale works by Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn and others.
The boy and his mother missed their intended train from Manchester to Oxford because Walton's father had spent the money for the fare in a local public house.
[24] Walton's works of the 1920s, while he was living in the Sitwells' attic, include the overture Portsmouth Point, dedicated to Sassoon and inspired by the well-known painting of the same name by Thomas Rowlandson.
"[27] Walton's other works of the 1920s included a short orchestral piece, Siesta (1926) and a Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra (1928), which was well-received at its premiere at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert, but has not entered the regular repertory.
In The Manchester Guardian, Eric Blom wrote, "This young composer is a born genius" and said that it was tempting to call the concerto the best thing in recent music of any nationality.
[n 9] Among Walton's other works from this decade are more film scores, including the first of his incidental music for Shakespeare adaptations, As You Like It (1936); a short ballet for a West End revue (1936); and a choral piece, In Honour of the City of London (1937).
[48] Its strong romantic style caused some critics to label it retrogressive,[49] and Walton said in a newspaper interview, "Today's white hope is tomorrow's black sheep.
[55] For the BBC, Walton composed the music for a large-scale radio drama, Christopher Columbus, written by Louis MacNeice and starring Olivier.
To take Walton's mind off his grief, the music publisher Leslie Boosey persuaded him to be a British delegate to a conference on copyright in Buenos Aires later that year.
Olivier, originally scheduled to direct it, backed out, as did Henry Moore who had agreed to design the production; Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, for whom the role of Cressida had been written, refused to perform it; her replacement, Magda László, had difficulty mastering the English words; and Sargent, the conductor, "did not seem well acquainted with the score".
[68] The piece was subsequently staged in San Francisco, New York and Milan during the next year, but failed to make a positive impression, and did not enter the regular operatic repertory.
[71] Walton's other works of the 1950s include the music for a fourth Shakespeare film, Olivier's Richard III, and the Cello Concerto (1956), written for Gregor Piatigorsky, who gave the premiere in January 1957 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the conductor Charles Munch.
Some critics felt that the concerto was old-fashioned; Peter Heyworth wrote that there was little in the work that would have startled an audience in the year the Titanic met its iceberg (1912).
[9] Walton's orchestral works of the 1960s include his Second Symphony (1960), Variations on a Theme by Hindemith (1963), Capriccio burlesco (1968), and Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten (1969).
[6] His ashes were buried on Ischia, and a memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey, where a commemorative stone to Walton was unveiled near those to Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten.
His early discovery of the basic elements of his style allowed him to assimilate successfully an astonishing number of disparate and apparently contradictory influences, such as Anglican anthems, jazz, and the music of Stravinsky, Sibelius, Ravel and Elgar.
"[89] Walton's first work for full orchestra, Portsmouth Point (1925), inspired by a Rowlandson print of the same name, depicts a rumbustious dockside scene (in Kennedy's phrase, "the sailors of H.M.S.
Pinafore have had a night on the tiles") in a fast moving score full of syncopation and cross-rhythm that for years proved hazardous for conductors and orchestras alike.
[90] Throughout his career, Walton wrote works in this pattern, such as the lively Comedy Overture Scapino, a virtuoso piece commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, described by The Musical Times as "an ingenious blending of fragments in exhilarating profusion.
"[91] Walton's post-war works in this genre are the Johannesburg Festival Overture (1956), the "diverting but hard-edged Capriccio burlesco" (1968),[10] and the longer Partita (1957), written for the Cleveland Orchestra, described by Grove as "an impressively concentrated score with a high-spirited finale [with] steely counterpoint and orchestral virtuosity".
[9] In this work, wrote Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor in The Record Guide, "the lyric poet in Walton, who had so far been hidden under a mask of irony, fully emerged.
[94] Grove 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.
Kennedy singles out for praise the Agincourt battle sequence in Henry V, where the music makes the charge of the French knights "fearsomely real.
[4] Grove calls the work a partially successful attempt to revivify the traditions of nineteenth-century Italian opera in a post-war era wary of heroic Romanticism.
[107] Walton's liturgical compositions include the Coronation Te Deum (1952), Missa brevis (1966), Jubilate Deo (1972), and Magnificat and Nunc dimittis (1974),[108] and the anthems A Litany (1916) and Set me as a seal upon thy heart (1938).
[110] Written for large orchestra, chorus and baritone soloist, it intersperses a choral and orchestral depiction of Babylonian excess and depravity, barbaric jazzy outbursts, and the lamentations and finally the rejoicing of the Jewish captives.
[112] In 1929 the small, new Decca company recorded eleven movements from Façade, with the composer conducting a chamber ensemble, with the speakers Edith Sitwell and Walton's friend and colleague Constant Lambert.
[122] Some live performances conducted by Walton were recorded and have been released on compact disc, including the Cello Concerto[123] and the Coronation Te Deum.
[n 18] In his later years, Walton formed friendships with younger composers including Hans Werner Henze and Malcolm Arnold, but although he admired their work, he did not influence their compositional styles.
