Shorter Choral Works without Orchestra, and: Symphony no. 1 (review)

William Walton. Shorter Choral Works without Orchestra. Edited by Timothy Brown. (William Walton Edition, 6.) Oxford; New York: Music Department, Oxford University Press, c1999. [Pref., p. v-x; sources, p. xi-xiii; textual notes, p. xv-xx; facsim., 2 p.; score, 135 p.; texts, p. 137-41. Cloth. ISBN 0-19-359432-3. $95.] Contains: A Litany (3 versions); Make We Joy Now in This Fest; Set Me as a Seal upon Thine Heart; Where Does the Uttered Music Go? Put off the Serpent Girdle; What Cheer?; The Twelve; Missa brevis; All This Time; Jubilate Deo; Cantico del sole; Magnificat and Nunc dimittis; Antiphon; and King Herod and the Cock.

William Walton. Symphony No. 1. Edited by David Lloyd-Jones. (William Walton Edition, 9.) Oxford; New York: Music Department, Oxford University Press, c1998. [Pref., p. v-x; sources, p. xi-xii; textual notes, p. xiii- xvi; facsims., 3 p.; orchestration, 1 p.; score, 212 p. Cloth. ISBN 0-19-368418-7. $155; duration: ca. 439.]

William Walton (1902-1983) occupies an unusual and somewhat anomalous niche in the history of twentieth-century English music. He was born too late to participate in the great efflorescence of British music that occurred just before the First World War and is best exemplified in the repertory today by the music of Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. A true cosmopolitan, Walton was indifferent to the blandishments of either folksong or Tudor polyphony and was fundamentally unsympathetic to Vaughan Williams's cultural nationalism. Despite an enormous vogue for his work during the years between the two great wars, Walton was dislodged from his preeminent position in the postwar musical establishment in 1946 by the decisive success of Benjamin Britten's epochal opera Peter Grimes. In 1949, Walton left his chilly native land to live in Italy, where he spent the rest of his life, perhaps to avoid the invidious comparisons made by increasingly unsympathetic critics with his facile and highly talented younger colleague.

Walton was a hesitant composer, a perfectionist in the mold of Maurice Ravel or Paul Dukas, who literally suffered over every note that he committed to paper. He hid both his insecurities and his perfectionism under a mask of studied hedonism and dry wit. A very hard worker, he preferred to appear lazy. Unlike either Vaughan Williams or Britten, he did not compose easily and ideas often proved recalcitrant--his body of work is distinguished more for the formal polish and elegance of his finest conceptions than for overt sincerity or technical innovation. Walton could compose quickly and well when pressed, but he usually spent a long time perfecting his scores. He worked intermittently from 1921 to 1956, for example, to create the definitive version of his most notorious early work, Façade for speaker and chamber ensemble.

His style is lapidary at best, and utterly inimitable. Walton possessed a hardy musical digestion that allowed him to assimilate a wide variety of influences, including the music of such seemingly incompatible figures as Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Edward Elgar, Sergei Prokofiev, George Gershwin, and Jean Sibelius. He relished both music hall tunes and Savoy jazz. From his early association with the Sitwells, Walton retained a lifelong and habitual preference for aesthetic sophistication and irony. Walton's ironic streak tempered his instinctual romanticism, thus generating an expressive tension that frequently resulted in music of great beauty, poignancy, and glamour.

Walton was supremely lucky in almost all of the aspects of his life and career, at least until the unhappy fate of his one grand opera, Troilus and Cressida (1947-54, revised 1963, 1972-76). He escaped from provincial penury by winning a scholarship as a chorister at Christ Church, Oxford; from then on, he met the right people at the right time, supporters who helped him financially--Osbert Sitwell provided Walton with room and board for over a decade--and professionally. His luck has extended into his posthumous career, as it were, for his widow has proved...