Tony Palmer's Film of At The Haunted End Of The Day, William Walton

Sir William Walton seems to have stumbled upon composing quite by accident. He was a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford and wanted some way to distinguish himself so that he would be allowed to stay on in Oxford after his voice broke. Unable to play any of the instruments well, Walton felt that perhaps composition would be the only way he could avoid being sent back to his family, and so he gave it a try. This visually beautiful DVD was originally a film first broadcast in 1981 on Easter Sunday at the South Bank Show in London. The film is a deserving winner of the Prix Italia and provides stunning images of Sir William's estate on Ischia in the Bay of Naples. Superb performances of works such as "Drop, drop, slow tears," "Belshazzar's Feast," and the breathtakingly mesmerizing, unbelievably poignant aria "At the Haunted End of the Day" from Walton's opera, Troilus and Cressida, as well as many more works that musically illustrate the entire span of the composer's distinguished career form the backbone of the film.

Director Tony Palmer tells the story of Walton's life in ninety-nine minutes organized into fourteen segments that are presented in roughly chronological order. The early years are depicted in a series of flashbacks reenacted with Walton and other close relatives and life-long friends telling the story as the actors move through the story. The viewer gets a real sense of the bleakness of Walton's home life and the fact that much of what happened in the com-poser's subsequent life was a direct result of his efforts never to return to the place of his birth. Cameos by Walton's engagingly entertaining Argentinian-born wife, Susana, and friends such as Julian Bream and Lawrence Olivier provide interesting insight into Walton's personality. Old newsreels and newspaper clippings alternate in quick succession with scenes from the myriad of propaganda films and British and Hollywood movies that Walton wrote scores for tell the fascinating story of what the composer did to "make himself useful" during and just following World War II. Walton mentions during an interview segment near the end of the film that he was looking forward to death, and less than two years after the film's premiere, in 1983, Walton died. Palmer mentions in the liner notes that he feels that his film is about "what we feel as human beings 'at the haunted end of the day.'"

Walton's music throughout the video is presented so that the extraordinary power and emotional intensity inherent in the composer's works is highlighted through superlative performance segments. Most of the works presented are heard in entirety and the overall impression to the viewer is that the film, like the music and the life it documents, is nothing less than a true a masterpiece and that the world should be unutterably grateful that young William Walton decided it was necessary to give composition a try.