SIR WILLIAM WALTON A Lancashire Musical

William Walton, one of the foremost British composers of the 20th century, was born 120 years ago in March 1902. Over a remarkable sixty-year career he produced an impressive body of work including symphonies, choral works and concertos. He enjoyed considerable success as a film score composer and was also responsible for specially commissioned musical pieces for two important royal occasions.

Although in later life he made a point of not talking about his northern roots, William Turner Walton was born in Werneth, an area of Oldham, on 29th March 1902. His father, Charles, was an accomplished singer and musician, who had been among the very first students to study at the Royal Manchester College of Music when it opened in 1893. Charles was subsequently appointed as the organist and choirmaster at St John’s Church in Werneth, where he remained for over 20 years. Walton’s mother, Louisa, was also a gifted singer.

The young William showed musical promise from an early age, singing in the church choir and learning how to play the piano. At the age of just 10, he travelled from Oldham to Oxford with his mother to attend an audition for probationer choristers at Christ Church Cathedral School after his father saw an advertisement in the newspaper.

Walton later recalled how the audition nearly didn’t happen at all. Just before setting off for the station, it was discovered that this father had spent the money intended for their train fares at the local pub. His mother was compelled to borrow the money from a neighbouring grocer, but they missed their intended train and arrived late for the audition in Oxford. In desperation, his mother pleaded for him to be heard and he was accepted.

He hated his first term in Oxford, as his fellow pupils made fun of his northern accent, and so began a lifelong compulsion on Walton’s part to reject his Lancashire background. In later life, the composer revealed that he only began to compose music initially “so as to make myself interesting”, as he feared that otherwise he would be sent home to Oldham when his voice broke and he could no longer perform as a boy chorister.

The strategy certainly proved successful. The then Dean of Christ Church, Dr Thomas Strong, was impressed by his work and took the young Walton under his wing, even paying his school fees when his scholarship was affected by the outbreak of World War I. Strong was not the only one to recognise Walton’s musical potential. On seeing some of the Oldham boy’s early manuscripts, the eminent composer, Sir Hubert Parry (today best known for setting Blake’s poem, Jerusalem, to music), remarked to Strong that, “There’s a lot in this chap; you must keep your eye on him”.

At the tender age of 16, Walton became an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, but although he continued to excel at his musical studies, he failed the exams in Greek and Algebra which were required for graduation. He did, however, make some influential acquaintances during his time at the university. One fellow undergraduate was a member of the famous Sitwell family. Sacheverell Sitwell introduced Walton to his siblings, Osbert and Edith, and offered him a helping hand when the budding composer failed to complete his degree by inviting him to stay with them all at their flat in Chelsea. Walton later reminisced that, “I went for a few weeks and stayed about fifteen years”.

The Sitwells were at the forefront of the cultural scene in the London of the early 1920s and through them Walton met some of the most influential artistic figures of the era including the poets Siegfried Sassoon and TS Eliot and the Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky. The siblings helped his career in other ways too. Walton first came to public attention when he collaborated with Edith Sitwell in setting some of her poems to music.

Façade is now regarded as one of Walton’s most notable works. The William Walton Trust, which was established following the composer’s death to continue to promote his music, describes Façade as “a nineteen-year old’s work of genius, original and inimitable”. However, its first performance was greeted with derision, with one newspaper review the following day headlined “Drivel they paid to hear”. The avantgarde way in which the work was staged probably did not help in this regard. Edith Sitwell appeared at the first performance, reciting her own poems through a large megaphone, but she was hidden from view by a flamboyantly decorated screen. Walton later successfully adapted the orchestral score for a ballet choreographed by Frederick Ashton, which is still performed on a regular basis today.

The publicity generated by that first performance of Façade in 1923 did, at the very least, help to raise Walton’s profile. His popular overture, Portsmouth Point, was performed at the Proms in 1927 and his Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra, with each movement dedicated to a different member of the Sitwell family, was similarly well-received.

Towards the end of 1928 the influential conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, suggested that Walton should write a concerto for the viola player, Lionel Tertis. Several other composers had already written pieces for Tertis, who was famous for having almost single-handedly rekindled interest in the viola as a solo instrument. Walton wrote his viola concerto whilst spending the winter at Amalfi in Italy with his friends, the Sitwells, but was mortified when Tertis rejected the piece on the grounds that it was too avant-garde for his taste. 

“This young composer is a born genius”

- The Manchester Guardian

Above: Christ Church, Oxford Credit: Soham Pablo/CC BY 2.0

 In the end, the concerto was performed for the first time in October 1929 with another musician, Paul Hindemith, as soloist. The work was greeted with instant critical acclaim. The Manchester Guardian music critic wrote that, “This young composer is a born genius”. Such was its impact that Tertis, who attended the premiere, realised almost immediately that he had made a mistake in rejecting the work and soon started performing it himself.

At the age of 27, Walton was propelled to the very top of the pile among the English composers of his generation. His next major composition, Belshazzar’s Feast, whose premiere at the Leeds Festival followed two years later, further cemented his reputation.

Walton had been first commissioned by the BBC in late 1929 to compose a short choral work. Osbert Sitwell came up with the idea of writing a cantata based on the biblical story of Belshazzar’s Feast and personally selected appropriate sections of text from the Old Testament. The BBC had asked for a small work requiring no more than fifteen musicians. Walton struggled, however, to compose the piece within the restrictions laid down by the BBC and eventually ended up with a choral work on a much grander scale. As well a full orchestra and chorus and baritone soloist, its first performance at the 1931 Leeds Festival also featured no less than two brass bands.

In early 1932 Walton was asked by the then conductor of Manchester’s famous Hallé Orchestra, Sir Hamilton Harty, to write a symphony. During his long career Walton became renowned for his painstaking composition technique and for his perfectionism. Progress on his First Symphony was typically slow, with the piece taking nearly four years to be completed. An emotional upheaval in his personal life also hindered the creative process when he was three-quarters of the way through completing the work.

Walton was now living abroad for much of the time. His relationship with the Sitwell family had cooled after he began a relationship with a wealthy young German widow called Imma von Doernberg in the late 1920s. He had composed three of the four movements for his symphony when, in early 1934, Imma left him.

The composer later admitted that the break-up had led to a severe case of writer’s block, and the fourth movement was only completed a year later after Walton became involved with Alice Wimborne, a Viscountess, 22 years his senior. The couple would remain close until Alice’s death in 1948.

Walton’s status in the classical music world was now such that he was invited to compose a special piece for the coronation of King George VI in May 1937. The composer whose music had only a decade or so earlier been viewed as too avant-garde by some critics was now viewed as the successor to the great Edward Elgar, who had died in 1934.

Kenneth Wright of the BBC’s Music Department wrote to one of his colleagues in late 1936 that, “Walton would love to be commissioned by the Corporation to write a really fine symphonic Coronation March. No one will doubt that his immense technical ability should produce a March…of equal value to the existing Elgar Marches. He is the one person of the younger generation of composers most able to do this”.

Unusually for Walton, he composed Crown Imperial in less than a fortnight. It was performed again at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, along with a new march by Walton, Orb and Sceptre. More recently, Crown Imperial was performed at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011.

As war in Europe loomed, Walton worked on a violin concerto whilst living with Alice in the Italian resort of Ravello. The composer later revealed that this work was intended to be a musical expression of his love for Alice. The William Walton Trust describes the concerto as “in many ways the most beautiful work Walton wrote”. He was unable to attend the work’s premiere in the USA in late 1939 because of the outbreak of World War II. 

Above: St John’s Church, Werneth Credit: Alexander Kapp/CC BY-SA 2.0

 During the war years Walton devoted much of his time to writing film music. Belying his reputation for being slow and methodical, in 1942 alone he composed the music for four films, all of which were intended to serve as unofficial morale-boosting propaganda for the war effort. He later turned his score for the 1942 film, The First of the Few, about the Spitfire’s designer, RJ Mitchell, into a concert work called Spitfire Prelude and Fugue. Walton’s score for Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film version of Shakespeare’s Henry V is another which is still performed regularly today.

By the time World War II ended in 1945, a major new British composer had emerged on the scene in the form of Benjamin Britten and Walton had effectively lost his position as the leading musical light of his generation. He was, nevertheless, commissioned by the BBC in 1947 to write his first opera based on Chaucer’s work, Troilus and Cressida. His work on it was halted by the death of Alice Wimborne in April 1948 and it was only eventually completed in 1954. The opera’s premiere later that same year was greeted with polite, but lukewarm, reviews.

At the end of 1948, only months after Alice’s death, Walton travelled to Buenos Aires for a conference. Whilst in Argentina, he met Susana Gil Passo, who, at the age of 22, was 24 years his junior. After a whirlwind romance, the couple were married and soon settled on the Italian island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. The spectacular gardens of the home which they later built there, La Mortella, have become famous in their own right and are now a popular tourist attraction.

Walton died at his home on Ischia in March 1983 at the age of 80. He had continued to compose music until the early 1970s when his health began to fail. Despite receiving a knighthood in 1951 and the prestigious Order of Merit in 1967, Walton appears to have become slightly resentful of the fact that, in later life, he did not receive the same level of attention as some of his peers such as Benjamin Britten. His self-imposed exile in Italy probably did not help in this regard.

Today, William Walton is rightly celebrated for his outstanding contribution to 20th-century British classical music. His memory also lives on in his birthplace of Oldham. In the early 1990s Oldham-born artist, Brian Clarke, designed three interlocking stained-glass skylights for the town’s Spindles Shopping Centre, which were inspired by Walton’s music. This spectacular artwork provides a fitting tribute to one of Oldham’s most famous sons. 