Biography
Click here for a chronological listing of biographical data.
Youth and Recognition
William Turner Walton was born on 29 March 1902, in the industrial Lancashire town of Oldham. His father was the director of the local church choir, and by participation therein Walton became familiar with much of the standard choral repertoire, including Haydn's Creation and Handel's Messiah. At the age of ten, Walton was accepted as a chorister of Christ Church Cathedral at Oxford University. While at Oxford, both as chorister and later as an undergraduate student, Walton familiarized himself with the masters of contemporary music: Stravinsky (especially Le sacre du printemps and Petrouchka), Bartók, Prokofiev, Strauss, Holst, Schoenberg, and Satie. He spent hours at Oxford's music library, studying new music scores, much to the detriment of his other studies. Hugh Allen, the Church organist, and Thomas Strong, the Dean of Christ Church, recognized a strong talent in Walton's few compositions of this period. Indeed, Hubert Parry and Ralph Vaughan Williams both knew and appreciated Walton's early works. Walton also frequented the concerts of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, and visits to London were not uncommon. There, he first heard Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and Rimsky-Korsakov's Le coq d'or, both of which the young student enjoyed. Walton also arranged concerts with his Oxford friend, the poet Sacheverell Sitwell. In 1918, the composer began a Piano Quartet, his first major work.
Despite his family's financial sacrifices, Walton did not get a degree from Oxford. When he left the university in 1920, Sitwell and his siblings (Osbert and Edith) invited him to lodge with them as an "adopted, or elected, brother." Walton accepted, and as a result met and befriended some of the most important musicians of the time: Ernest Ansermet, Edward Dent, Ferruccio Busoni, Peter Warlock, Spike Hughes, Frederick Delius, Angus Morrison, Bernard van Dieren, and Constant Lambert, who grew to be Walton's close friend. The Sitwells also introduced him to literary figures such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. With the Ballets russes in London, Walton also knew much of the music associated with Diaghilev and his entourage: Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat, Satie's Parade, Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, and works by Debussy and Les Six. Many of these compositions proved to be great influences on his own output.
Walton spent most of his time in an upstairs room at the Sitwell home composing enthusiastically. The aforementioned Piano Quartet was performed in Salzburg in 1923, as part of the International Society for Contemporary Music's annual concerts, when he met Alban Berg and Schoenberg. This was the extent of his major compositional outcome before the ground-breaking "entertainment" (scored for four instrumentalists to the simultaneous recitation of poetry by Edith Sitwell), Façade, first performed at the Sitwell home in Chelsea in January 1922. The work was revised in 1926, and further popularized in the 1928 ISCM festival at Siena. Meanwhile, Walton played piano with a jazz band for a year, and wrote an unpublished Fantasia Concertante. The first performance of the concert overture Portsmouth Point, at the 1926 ISCM festival in Zürich, solidified Walton's reputation as an important young composer. Portsmouth Point was especially popular in the United States, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra included it in their repertoire for a 1929 tour. Subsequent pieces, Siesta for small orchestra and a Sinfonia Concertante for orchestra and piano (the latter an adaptation from a ballet refused by Diaghilev), were not as successful.
Rise to Fame
About this time, Lionel Tertis commissioned a Viola Concerto from Walton, who composed the work at the Sitwells' Italian winter retreat in early 1929. Tertis subsequently rejected the concerto, and Paul Hindemith premiered the work. (In all fairness, Tertis attended the premiere and performed the work at the 1930 ISCM festival in Liège.) It was instantly hailed as a masterpiece of intense yet private emotional display, and revered the world over. This success was followed by a truly opposite, but equally successful, work, the monstrous choral Belshazzar's Feast, commissioned by the BBC, but premiered at the 1931 Leeds Festival to outstanding reviews. (In case the reader hasn't yet noticed the trend, this work, too, was performed at an ISCM festival: 1933 in Amsterdam.)
In January 1932, Hamilton Harty asked Walton for a symphony. Composition progressed slowly, blocked by his own inhibitions, the global economic depression, and by the illness of the Baroness Imma von Doernberg, with whom Walton lived in Switzerland for a time. A performance of the first three movements was held in December 1934, the year in which Imma left him and Walton found new love in Lady Alice Wimborne. This situation was not approved by the Sitwells, and Walton finally moved out of their home permanently. During this time of transition, Walton composed his first film score, Escape Me Never, and slowly resumed work on the First Symphony, which was finally premiered in November 1935 to the best reviews Walton had yet received. This symphony was hailed as equal to those of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, and critics further promulgated Walton's fame as the musical "white hope" of England.
After these three monstrous successes, Walton took a break, composing some incidental music and another film score. The march Crown Imperial, composed for the 1937 coronation of King George VI, affirmed Walton as the successor to Elgar's tradition of great ceremonial music. The choral work In Honour of the City of London received its first performance at the Leeds Festival of that same year. At this time, Walton met and befriended another young composer, Benjamin Britten. Furthermore, Jascha Heifetz and the British Council commissioned a Violin Concerto, which Walton began in earnest in late 1937. In 1939, he and Lady Wimborne went to America to present the concerto to Heifetz, who was extremely enthusiastic. However, the outbreak of war prevented Walton from attending the first performance. Walton learned to conduct in preparation for the English premiere of the concerto, and he later became an excellent conductor of his own works.
Films and Troilus
At the beginning of the war, Walton wrote another film score and the overture Scapino for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. However, in early 1941, Walton was drafted to military service. The Ministry of Information requested that he compose music for patriotic films instead of serve in combat, and thus Walton wrote four film scores in 1942, the most important being The Foreman Went to France and The First of the Few. He also wrote the score for Henry V, the first of three Shakespeare films directed by Laurence Olivier, for which Walton was even nominated for an Academy Award.
The first performance of Peter Grimes in April 1945 solidified Britten's supremacy as England's major composer. Almost literally overnight, Walton's music was berated as reactionary and out of touch with modern compositional trends. Nevertheless, the end of the war brought more compositional freedom for Walton, which he celebrated with the String Quartet in A minor. By now, he was on various committees and musical boards in London, which further occupied his time.
In February 1947, the BBC commissioned an opera from Walton, and Lady Wimborne introduced him to Christopher Hassall, who was to be the librettist. This project occupied the majority of Walton's thoughts and efforts for nearly eight years. During this time, Lady Wimborne died, Walton married Susana Gil on a trip to Argentina in 1948, he was knighted in 1951, and the Waltons began to live on the island of Ischia, off the coast of Naples, for the better part of each year. He took brief respite from the opera to compose a Violin Sonata for Yehudi Menuhin and two pieces to commemorate the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (the march Orb and Sceptre and a choral Coronation Te Deum). The eagerly awaited opera, Troilus and Cressida, finally received a premiere at Covent Garden in December 1954, to reviews that were more cordial than positive. It was Walton's first opera, and his first major concert work in fourteen years. In these fourteen years, much had changed in Walton's personal life, and even more had changed in musical climate.
Commission after Commission
In 1955, Walton received two honorary doctorates: from the Universities of Cambridge and London. He also composed another Shakespeare film for Laurence Olivier, Richard III. In a surprisingly brief period of eight months in 1956, he wrote a Cello Concerto in response to a commission from Gregor Piatigorsky. George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra commissioned the Partita for Orchestra and the Huddersfield Choral Society paid for the Gloria. At this time, Walton first met the guitarist Julian Bream, and he composed the song-cycle Anon. in Love for Bream and the tenor Peter Pears. In 1960, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society performed Walton's Second Symphony at the Edinburgh Festival, and in 1962, the Royal Philharmonic Society commissioned the Variations on a Theme by Hindemith.
The year 1963 saw Walton on a world tour to Israel, New Zealand, and Australia, where Troilus and Cressida was performed at the Adelaide Festival. This and other events led Walton to compose for the stage again, this time a comic opera for the 1967 Aldeburgh Festival entitled The Bear. This work yielded Walton's first truly warm critical reviews since the Violin Concerto of 1939. The late 1960s saw further commissions: Capriccio burlesco for the New York Philharmonic in 1968, and Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten for the San Francisco Symphony in the following year. Two more important premieres took place in 1971: the Five Bagatelles for Guitar, again for Julian Bream, and Walton's arrangement of the A-minor String Quartet into a Sonata for Strings, in response to the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
The Grand Old Man
By the time of Walton's seventieth birthday in 1972, he was respected as a conservative musical establishment, while always remaining true to his own compositional ideals. Finally, the critics began to recognize that Walton's compositions were worthwhile, though they were not altogether accepted. Indeed, Walton affectionately became the "Grand Old Man" of English music, succeeding Vaughan Williams with this unofficial title. In the summer of 1973, Walton conducted a 50th-anniversary performance of Façade, the last time he conducted his own work. He became increasingly ill, with problems in walking and with cerebral circulation. Having overcome these episodes, Walton attended a revival of Troilus and Cressida at Covent Garden in 1976. Repeated attempts to compose a Third Symphony for his friend, the conductor André Previn, ended up either in the fireplace or otherwise incomplete.
Waltons' later life is littered with brief choral works (Magnificat and Nunc dimittis), fanfares (Roaring Fanfare), arrangements (Varii capricci from the Five Bagatelles, Façade 2 from unpublished material), and revisions (Troilus and Cressida). His last two original compositions were both composed for Mstislav Rostropovich: a Passacaglia for Cello and Prologo e fantasia for him and the National Symphony Orchestra. Walton's health continued to fail him, as his eyesight and walking became increasingly difficult, and he became subject to strong nightmares. On 7 March 1983, Walton telephoned a friend, enthusiastic about composing a choral Stabat Mater. The next morning, Walton died peacefully at his home in Ischia.