William Walton: Behind the Facade

by Susana Walton, Sir William Walton

The acclaimed English composer William Walton-- enfant terrible of English music in the 1920s and '30s, composer of Façade , Belshazzar's Feast , and a host of other brilliant works--lived a long and accomplished life. Admitted as a nine-year-old Lancashire schoolboy to Christ Church Choir School
in Oxford, he was discovered by Sacheverell Sitwell as an undergraduate at Christ Church, adopted by all three Sitwells, and early on discovered a publisher willing to back his unconventional music. He was, along with Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten, one of the giants of 20th-century
British music.
In this moving memoir, Susana Walton has created an intimate and revealing portrait of this great English composer, recounting his entire career and their thirty-five years of marriage. The book brims with colorful anecdotes of some of the people who played a part in Walton's life, including the
Sitwells, Laurence Olivier (for whose three Shakespeare movies Walton composed the score), Benjamin Britten, Maria Callas, Lord Kenneth Clark, W.H. Auden, Yehudi Menuhin, and Julian Bream. Packed with numerous photographs, many of which have never before been published, this charming volume offers
many insights into Walton, the composer and the man.

Genres: Music

266 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Charlotte · Rating 2 out of 5]

What music of William Walton that I know, I have always enjoyed and regarded highly. The Crown Imperial March, Belshazzar's Feast, Henry V - all wonderful pieces of music. But I knew very little about him as a person until I read this. In some ways I was disappointed to learn that he wasn't a particularly nice man - for example, he didn't tell his wife until too late that he didn't want any children, and when she inadvertently became pregnant, he essentially forced her to have an abortion. That that same wife wrote this biography of him was one of the strange things about the book. They were married for about 35 years, and at no point in the book does Lady Walton really show why she married him, or give any real indication of her feelings about him. There are lots of details about their life together, many vignettes about famous friends of theirs, and a great deal of information about Walton's work and music, but it is always delivered at a remote distance, without feeling or emotion.
I would recommend this as an interesting account of a great composer, and as an introduction to his music (and if you don't know his music, please try it!). But, as a biography, written by his wife no less, it falls a bit flat.

[Jillian]

It was interesting to read about the composer & the person, but it was written very simplistically. When there was no place to record a memory, it felt like Susana Walton just incorporated it into a paragraph somewhere, rather than leave it out or give it its own paragraph. There was little development in the ideas or stories, but rather just unrelated stories linked together. I was surprised to read about how envious or jealous Walton was about other composers and their works, as if they were a threat to his work or himself. I was somewhat disappointed to hear about how emotionally stunted or childish Walton seemed. He also didn't seem to have much faith in himself as a composer, pianist, or conductor.