Sir William Walton(1902–1983)

William Turner Walton was born at 93 Werneth Hall Road, Werneth, on the south side of Oldham in industrial Lancashire, on 29 March 1902, second son of Charles Walton, a local choirmaster and singing teacher who also ran a theatrical-agency business out of the front parlour, and Louisa Maria Turner. The household was hand-to-mouth and musical. The four Walton children (Noel, William, Alec and Nora) were trained at the kitchen table on the standard Lancashire-Wesleyan vocal repertoire; the boys all sang in the parish-church and chapel choirs of the Oldham townscape from infancy. William's voice was, by his father's later account, the best of the four. The boy was admitted at ten as a probationer of the Christ Church Cathedral Choir School at Oxford in 1912, on a scholarship audition organised by Charles Walton in person on a borrowed five pounds for the train fare from Oldham to Oxford.

Christ Church Cathedral Choir gave him the technical training. He stayed at the choir school through the standard four years of probationary and full-choirister-ship, was admitted to Christ Church itself as an undergraduate at sixteen (the youngest undergraduate at the college since the seventeenth century, on a five-year music scholarship requiring no formal matriculation in the standard subjects), and read music there to 1922. The Christ Church years exposed him to the Oxford circle of Sir Hugh Allen, the organist of New College, who turned him onto the late Romantic German repertoire and the Stravinsky-Ravel-Schoenberg new-music tradition that the Oxford undergraduates of the 1918-22 period were the first English audience of. He failed his BMus three times on the harmony examinations (the technical exam reading was below his sight-reading capacity by a substantial margin, as the examiners noted) and left Oxford in the summer of 1922 without a degree.

The Sitwells took him in. Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, the three aristocratic post-First-World-War poets and patrons of the new English modernism, met Walton at Oxford in 1920 through Osbert's brother Sacheverell who was at Christ Church the same year; they invited him to live at their family house at 2 Carlyle Square, Chelsea, on the working principle that he was a young composer who needed three meals a day and a piano and a study desk for the next decade. He lived with them at Carlyle Square for fifteen years, from 1922 to 1937. *Façade*, the recitation-and-chamber-ensemble setting of Edith's poems, was the first major collaboration. It was first performed privately at 2 Carlyle Square on 24 January 1922 (Edith reciting through a megaphone behind a painted screen) and publicly at the Aeolian Hall, London, on 12 June 1923. The audience reception was hostile and the press reception was the post-war modernism's signature mixed reception (the *Daily Mail* called it *drivel* and the *Manchester Guardian* called it the most original British work of the decade). It became, across the subsequent two decades of orchestral suites and concert performances, the foundation work of his concert repertoire.

*Belshazzar's Feast*, the choral-orchestral oratorio on the Book of Daniel text adapted by Osbert Sitwell, was first performed by the Leeds Festival Choir under Malcolm Sargent at the Leeds Town Hall on 8 October 1931. The piece was the foundation event of the English choral revival of the 1930s. The Symphony No. 1 in B-flat minor was first performed (in incomplete form, the finale not written) at the BBC Queen's Hall on 3 December 1934 and complete on 6 November 1935; it took its place alongside Elgar's First Symphony and Vaughan Williams's Fifth as one of the three foundational twentieth-century English symphonies. The coronation march *Crown Imperial* for the coronation of George VI in May 1937, and *Orb and Sceptre* for the coronation of Elizabeth II in June 1953, sealed his position as the composer the Establishment turned to for state ceremonial. He was knighted in 1951, awarded the Order of Merit in 1967.

The collaboration with Laurence Olivier on three Shakespeare film scores (*Henry V*, 1944; *Hamlet*, 1948; *Richard III*, 1955) put English film music on the international map. The *Henry V* score in particular, written across the autumn of 1943 on a desperate deadline (Walton finished the title-page march eight hours before the studio orchestra recorded it at Denham), used a mixed orchestral palette and a fifteenth-century-melodic register that became, after the war, the model for English literary-historical-period film scoring. He met the young Argentine medical student Susana Gil Passo at a British Council reception in Buenos Aires in 1948, married her ten weeks later, and moved with her in 1949 to the small house at La Mortella on the volcanic island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples that became the home of his last thirty-three years. He wrote two operas (*Troilus and Cressida*, 1954; *The Bear*, 1967), a viola concerto, a violin concerto and the cello concerto for Gregor Piatigorsky in his Ischia years, and died at the La Mortella house on 8 March 1983, eighty years old. Susana Walton outlived him by twenty-seven years and turned La Mortella into the public garden that draws Ischia's visitor traffic now. The Walton name in its English-side catalogue is the locative *walh-tūn*, the village of the Britons, the Old-English parish-place-name marking the Welsh-speaking enclaves that survived into early medieval Anglo-Saxon territory; he carried it from a Lancashire choirmaster's house into the foundation of twentieth-century English concert music and English film scoring.