Biography
Born in Lancashire, Walton won a place as a chorister at Christ Church, Oxford, and left at the age of sixteen having already gained his degree.
While he was at the university he made a number of acquaintances who were to become extremely influential in his career, most importantly Sacheverell Sitwell.
Walton lived with the Sitwell family for some time and derived enormous benefit from the cross-cultural influences to which he was subjected.
They introduced him to Constant Lambert, a much respected composer of the day, who played a significant part in developing Walton’s own style of composition.
The Sitwells devised a special piece of home entertainment in the form of a work entitled Façade: poems by Edith Sitwell were set to music by Walton and arranged for a small, diverse collection of instruments shielded from the audience by a curtain through which a megaphone was inserted for the narration of the poems.
From the unlikely drawing-room setting of the first performance, this has now probably become Walton’s most famous piece.
Walton went through an intensely creative period following the success of Façade and produced such fine works as the overture Portsmouth Point, the Viola Concerto and Belshazzar’s Feast.
A few years later, in 1935, came the Symphony No. 1, which is still regarded as one of the most important symphonic works written by a British composer during the inter-war years.
Walton then found a new outlet for his work in the form of film music and wrote the scores to a number of famous movies, including Henry V, Hamlet and Richard lll – these three stemming from a fruitful collaboration with Laurence Olivier.
After the war, Walton’s music lost something of its former glory and sense of British inspiration.
He had moved to Italy during this period and this may have had something to do with the inherent change in style.
However, the opera Troilus and Cressida is a fine work, although not often performed today.
Walton once said of himself that he was ‘a classical composer with a strong feeling for lyricism’, and this is definitely the case.
His works are well worth exploring if you are a fan of British music in general.
Façade
Façade: ‘Popular Song’
1923, Chamber Music
Walton took some poems by Edith Sitwell and arranged them for performance by a single reciter and a small instrumental ensemble for a performance in 1923. Subsequent performances varied the number of ‘settings’ (as Walton called them), as more than forty were written. The music became so well known that in 1931 two orchestral suites and a ballet were produced.