Musicians - William Walton

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	Musicians - William Walton

Sir William Turner Walton, OM (March 29, 1902–March 8, 1983) was a British composer whose style was influenced by the works of Stravinsky, Sibelius and jazz. He is primarily remembered for his orchestral works, choral music, film scores, and ceremonial music.

Born in Oldham, he studied at Christ Church, Oxford. He moved to London where he lodged with the literary Sitwell family. His setting of poems from Edith Sitwell's Façade brought him notoriety as a modernist, and this was followed by acclaim for his symphonic orchestral works and the oratorio Belshazzar's Feast. Having proved adept at writing ceremonial music he was exempted from military service during World War II in order to compose scores for patriotic British films. He was knighted in 1951, and was admitted to the Order of Merit in 1968. He died in Ischia, Italy, where he had settled in 1949.

Biography

Early Life and Rise to Fame

Walton was born in Oldham, Lancashire, to a musical family. At the age of ten, Walton was accepted as a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, and he subsequently entered Christ Church, Oxford as an undergraduate at the unusual age of sixteen. He was largely self-taught as a composer, but received some tutelage from Hugh Allen, the cathedral organist. At Oxford Walton befriended two poets—Sacheverell Sitwell and Siegfried Sassoon—who would prove influential in publicizing his music. Little of Walton's juvenilia survives, but the choral anthem A Litany exhibits striking harmonies and voice-leading which was more advanced than that of many older contemporary composers in Britain.

Walton left Oxford without a degree in 1920, to lodge in London with the literary Sitwell siblings—Sacheverell, Osbert and Edith—as an 'adopted, or elected, brother'. Through the Sitwells, Walton became familiar with many of the most important figures in British music between the World Wars, most particularly his fellow composer, Constant Lambert. Walton's first reputation was one of notoriety, built on his ground-breaking musical accompaniment to Edith Sitwell's Façade poems. The 1923 first public performance of the jazz-influenced Façade resulted in Walton's being branded an avant-garde modernist. An early string quartet gained only slight international recognition, including a performance at the 1923 festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Salzburg, with a much appreciative Alban Berg in attendance.

During the 1920s, Walton made a little income playing piano at jazz clubs, but spent most of his time in the Sitwells' attic composing. The orchestral overture Portsmouth Point was the first work to point toward his eventual accomplishments, including a strong rhythmic drive, together with a dissonant but predominantly tonal harmonic language. It was the Viola Concerto of 1929, however, which catapulted him to the forefront of British classical music, its bittersweet melancholy proving quite popular; it remains a cornerstone of the solo viola repertoire. This success was following by equally acclaimed works: the massive choral cantata Belshazzar's Feast (1931), the Symphony No. 1 (1935), the coronation march Crown Imperial (1937), and the Violin Concerto (1939). Each of these works remains firmly entrenched in the repertoire today.

After World War II

During World War II, Walton was granted leave from military service in order to compose music for propagandistic films, such as The First of the Few (1942) and Laurence Olivier's adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry V (1944). By the mid-1940s, the rise to fame of younger composers such as Benjamin Britten substantially curtailed Walton's reception among music critics, though the public always received his music enthusiastically. After composing a second string quartet (1946)—his strongest achievement in the world of chamber music—Walton dedicated the considerable period of seven years to his three-act tragic opera, Troilus and Cressida (1947-1954). The opera was not widely acclaimed, and it was from this point that Walton's reputation as an old-fashioned composer became confirmed.

After Troilus and Cressida, Walton returned to orchestral music, composing in rapid succession the Cello Concerto (1956), the Symphony No. 2 (1960), and his masterpiece of the post-war period, the Variations on a Theme by Hindemith (1963). His music from the 1960s shows a reticence to accept the post-war avant-garde trends espoused by Boulez and others, as Walton preferred to compose in the post-Romantic style which he had found most rewarding. Indeed, he was far from forgotten, having been knighted in 1951 and received the Order of Merit in 1968. His one-act comic opera, The Bear, was well received at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1967, and commissions came from as far afield as the New York Philharmonic (Capriccio burlesco, 1968), and the San Francisco Symphony (Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten, 1969). His song-cycles from this period were premiered by artists as illustrious as Peter Pears (Anon. in love, 1960) and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table, 1962).

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