55 Facts About William Walton

Sir William Turner Walton was an English composer.

William Walton's earliest work of note was a collaboration with Edith Sitwell, Facade, which at first brought him notoriety as a modernist, but later became a popular ballet score.

In middle age, William Walton left Britain and set up home with his young wife Susana on the Italian island of Ischia.

William Walton was a slow worker, painstakingly perfectionist, and his complete body of work across his long career is not large.

William Walton was born into a musical family in Oldham, Lancashire, the second son in a family of three boys and a girl.

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William Walton's father, Charles Alexander Walton, was a musician who had trained at the Royal Manchester College of Music under Charles Halle, and made a living as a singing teacher and church organist.

William Walton was more successful as a singer: he and his elder brother sang in their father's choir, taking part in performances of large-scale works by Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn and others.

The boy and his mother missed their intended train from Manchester to Oxford because William Walton's father had spent the money for the fare in a local public house.

William Walton remained at the choir school for the next six years.

William Walton came under the influence of Hugh Allen, the dominant figure in Oxford's musical life.

William Walton spent much time in the university library, studying scores by Stravinsky, Debussy, Sibelius, Roussel and others.

At Oxford William Walton befriended several poets including Roy Campbell, Siegfried Sassoon and, most importantly for his future, Sacheverell Sitwell.

William Walton was sent down from Oxford in 1920 without a degree or any firm plans.

William Walton took up residence in the attic of their house in Chelsea, later recalling, "I went for a few weeks and stayed about fifteen years".

William Walton took music lessons with Ernest Ansermet, Ferruccio Busoni and Edward J Dent.

William Walton attended the Russian ballet, met Stravinsky and Gershwin, heard the Savoy Orpheans at the Savoy Hotel and wrote an experimental string quartet heavily influenced by the Second Viennese School that was performed at a festival of new music at Salzburg in 1923.

Alban Berg heard the performance and was impressed enough to take William Walton to meet Arnold Schoenberg, Berg's teacher and the founder of the Second Viennese School.

In 1923, in collaboration with Edith Sitwell, William Walton had his first great success, though at first it was a succes de scandale.

The work consisted of Edith's verses, which she recited through a megaphone from behind a screen, while William Walton conducted an ensemble of six players in his accompanying music.

William Walton had love affairs and new friendships that drew him out of their orbit.

William Walton's later affair with Alice, Viscountess Wimborne was born on 1880, and which lasted from 1934 until her death in April 1948, caused a wider breach between Walton and the Sitwells, as she disliked them as much as they disliked her.

William Walton had composed the first three of the four movements by the end of 1933 and promised the premiere to the conductor Hamilton Harty.

Harty persuaded William Walton to let him perform the three existing movements, which he premiered in December 1934 with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Elgar having died in 1934, the authorities turned to William Walton to compose a march in the Elgarian tradition for the coronation of George VI in 1937.

William Walton's Crown Imperial was an immediate success with the public, but disappointed those of Walton's admirers who thought of him as an avant-garde composer.

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The concerto, William Walton later revealed, expressed his love for Alice Wimborne.

William Walton is charming, but I feel always the school relationship with him – he is so obviously the head prefect of English music, whereas I'm the promising new boy.

William Walton was at first dismissive of his film scores, regarding them as professional but of no intrinsic worth; he resisted attempts to arrange them into concert suites, saying, "Film music is not good film music if it can be used for any other purpose.

William Walton was conscious that Britten, with Les Illuminations, the Sinfonia da Requiem (1942), and Peter Grimes in 1945, had produced a series of substantial works, while William Walton had produced no major composition since the Violin Concerto in 1939.

In 1947, William Walton was presented with the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal.

William Walton decided to base it on Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, but his preliminary work came to a halt in April 1948 when Alice Wimborne died.

William Walton persisted, and she eventually accepted his proposal of marriage.

The premiere had a friendly reception, but there was a general feeling that Hassall and William Walton had written an old-fashioned opera in an outmoded tradition.

In 1956 William Walton sold his London house and took up full-time residence on Ischia.

William Walton built a hilltop house at Forio and called it La Mortella.

William Walton had become so used to being written off by music critics that he felt "there must be something wrong when the worms turned on some praise.

William Walton was commissioned to compose a score for the 1969 film Battle of Britain, but the film company rejected most of his score, replacing it with music by Ron Goodwin.

William Walton was never a facile or quick composer, and in his final decade, he found composition increasingly difficult.

William Walton repeatedly tried to compose a third symphony for Andre Previn, but eventually abandoned it.

William Walton revised the score of Troilus and Cressida, and the opera was staged at Covent Garden in 1976.

William Walton was in poor health; Previn, who was to conduct, fell ill; and the tenor chosen for Troilus pulled out.

William Walton took part in Palmer's profile of him, At the Haunted End of the Day, in 1981, and in 1982 William Walton and his wife played the cameo roles of King Frederick Augustus and Queen Maria of Saxony in Palmer's nine-hour film Wagner.

William Walton died at La Mortella on 8 March 1983, at the age of 80.

William Walton's ashes were buried on Ischia, and a memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey, where a commemorative stone to Walton was unveiled near those to Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten.

Later writers have concluded that William Walton had little influence on the next generation of composers.

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William Walton's music has often been too neatly dismissed by a few descriptive tags: "bittersweet", "nostalgic" and, after World War II, "same as before".

William Walton regarded his ballet and incidental music as of less importance than his concert works and was generally dismissive of what he produced.

William Walton's ballets for Sadler's Wells, The Wise Virgins is an arrangement of eight extracts from choral and instrumental music by Bach.

William Walton wrote little incidental music for the theatre, his music for Macbeth being one of his most notable contributions to the genre.

William Walton arranged the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue from his own score for The First of the Few.

William Walton allowed suites to be arranged from his Shakespeare film scores of the 1940s and 1950s; in these films, he mixed Elizabethan pastiche with wholly characteristic Waltonian music.

William Walton worked for many years on his only full-length opera, Troilus and Cressida, both before its premiere and afterwards.

William Walton briefly refers back to Schoenberg with a dodecaphonic passage in the second movement, but otherwise the sonata is firmly tonal.

William Walton made studio recordings of the First Symphony, the Viola Concerto, the Violin Concerto, the Sinfonia Concertante, the Facade Suites, the Partita, Belshazzar's Feast, and suites from his film scores for Shakespeare plays and The First of the Few.

Some live performances conducted by William Walton were recorded and have been released on compact disc, including the Cello Concerto and the Coronation Te Deum.