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William Walton

 
Actor: William Walton
 
Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Actors
  • Born: Mar 29, 1902 in Oldham, Lancashire, England, UK
  • Died: 1983
  • Occupation: Actor
  • Active: '30s-'40s, '70s-'80s
  • Major Genres: Drama, Romance
  • Career Highlights: Hamlet, Henry V, Richard II
  • First Major Screen Credit: Escape Me Never (1935)

Biography

William Walton is among Great Britain's most distinguished 20th century composers and has created many highly regarded concertos, symphonies, operas, and oratorios. He has also scored a number of major British films including Hamlet (1948) and Battle of Britain (1969). ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
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Biography: Sir William Turner Walton
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Sir William Turner Walton (1902-1983) was one of the principal composers among the enlightened conservatives of 20th-century England.

William Walton received his first music lessons from his father, who was a singing teacher. At the age of 10 William was enrolled in the Cathedral Choir School at Oxford; at 16 he entered the university, where it appears that he received little systematic training in music. From an early age, however, he was composing, and this self-tutelage must have been effective, for at 20 he wrote a String Quartet that was accepted for performance at a Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music. In the same year (1922) he collaborated rated with the poet Edith Sitwell on Facade, a clever "entertainment" for speaking voice and six instrumental players, which epitomizes certain aspects of the smart set in the era after World War I.

During the next decade Walton's reputation was solidly established with a lively overture about ships and sailors entitled Portsmouth Point (1925); a Sinfonia concertante for orchestra and piano (1927); a Concerto for viola (1929), which is one of the few important solo works for that instrument; and Belshazzar's Feast (1931), a vivid and very popular addition to the long line of English oratorios. From then on he continued to compose steadily in an unhurried fashion and usually on commission or with distinguished sponsorship which ensured performance. Although his catalog after Belshazzar was not long, the items are substantial. In addition to a few songs, marches and incidental and film music, there are the large works, including two Symphonies (1935, 1960), a Concerto for violin (1939), a ballet entitled The Quest (1943), a second String Quartet (1947), a Sonata for violin and piano (1949), the opera Troilus and Cressida (1954), a Concerto for cello (1956), a Partita for orchestra (1958), the orchestral Variations on a Theme by Hindemith (1963), a Missa brevis (1966), the one-act extravaganza The Bear (1967) and Capriccio burlesco for orchestra (1969).

Walton composed slowly and meticulously. Paul Hindemith complimented him on the "honest solidity of workmanship" in his scores; yet they do not give a labored effect, for a rhythmic vigor permeates everything Walton wrote. His style is also marked by a harmonic idiom that is tonal though modernized and a preference for melodic lines of considerable amplitude as against the highly condensed mode of the post-Anton Webern school. In Troilus, for example, Walton said that he wanted to write a bel canto, or "singing" opera, which in his case is more a statement of artistic independence than merely a look backward.

Walton's music shows that he knew what other composers were doing in the 20th century and profited from observation of such diverse men as Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Jean Sibelius. Nevertheless, Walton did not subscribe to any cult or try to be especially English in his work.

Knighted in 1951, he died March 8, 1983, at his home on Ischia, an island off the coast of Italy.

Further Reading

Walton's general position in the modern music world is sketched in Joseph Machlis, Introduction to Contemporary Music (1961), and his place among English composers is described in Frank Howes, The English Musical Renaissance (1966). For a detailed analysis of his music see Frank Howes, The Music of William Walton (1965).

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Sir William Turner Walton
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(born March 29, 1902, Oldham, Lancashire, Eng. — died March 8, 1983, Ischia, Italy) British composer. His parents were musicians, and he learned to sing and play piano and violin early. He established his reputation at age 19 by setting to jazzy music the whimsical poetry of Edith Sitwell (see Sitwell family); Façade (1923) premiered with the poet reading her poetry through a megaphone. Walton's later works include Belshazzar's Feast (1931), two symphonies (1935, 1960), and concertos for viola, violin, and cello (1929, 1939, 1956). His scores for Laurence Olivier's films of Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1947), and Richard III (1955) became well known; he also wrote coronation marches for George VI and Elizabeth II.

For more information on Sir William Turner Walton, visit Britannica.com.

 
British History: Sir William Walton
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Walton, Sir William (1902-83). English composer. Walton was a chorister and undergraduate at Oxford, although he remained a largely self-taught composer. He was adopted by the Sitwell family, causing a stir with his ‘entertainment’ Façade (1921-2), in which Edith Sitwell's poems were recited through a megaphone. The Viola Concerto (1929) helped establish a less controversial reputation. The dramatic paganism of Belshazzar's Feast (1931), although initially startling to audiences with its raw energy and powerful orchestration, lies firmly within the English choral tradition. His film music is justly renowned, especially the score for Olivier's Henry V (1943-4).

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Sir William Turner Walton
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Walton, Sir William Turner, 1902–83, English composer, b. Oldham. Walton studied at Oxford. One of his earliest works was a piano quartet (1918–19). In 1923, Façade, satirical poems by Edith Sitwell read to Walton's jazz-inflected music, had enormous success in London. His orchestral works, noted for eloquent melodic structure, include the overtures Portsmouth Point (1925) and Scapino (1940) and two symphonies (1935, 1961). He wrote an oratorio, Belshazzar's Feast (1931), and coronation marches for George VI (1937) and Elizabeth II (1953). Walton's concerto for viola and orchestra (1929), a violin concerto (1939), a sonata for violin and piano (1950), and a cello concerto (1956) are also well known. Among the films for which he composed musical scores are Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1947), and Richard III (1954). Walton wrote the opera Troilus and Cressida in 1954 and the one-act extravaganza The Bear in 1967. He was knighted in 1951.

Bibliography

See The Selected Letters of William Walton (2002) ed. by M. Hayes; biographies by N. Tierny (1984), S. Walton (1988), M. Kennedy (1989, repr. 1998), and S. Lloyd (2002); H. Burton and M. Murray, William Walton: The Romantic Loner: A Centenary Portrait Album (2002); studies by F. S. Howes (rev. ed. 1974) and S. R. Craggs (1999); At the Haunted End of the Day...A Profile of Sir William Walton (video documentary, 1987).

 
Wikipedia: William Walton
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For other persons named William Walton, see William Walton (disambiguation).

Sir William Turner Walton OM (29 March 1902–8 March 1983) was a British composer and conductor.

His style was influenced by the works of Stravinsky and Prokofiev as well as jazz music, and is characterized by rhythmic vitality, bittersweet harmony, sweeping Romantic melody and brilliant orchestration. His output includes orchestral and choral works, chamber music and ceremonial music, as well as notable film scores. His earliest works, especially Edith Sitwell's Façade brought him notoriety as a modernist, but it was with orchestral symphonic works and the oratorio Belshazzar's Feast that he gained international recognition.

Contents

Biography

Early life and rise to fame

Walton was born into a musical family,[1] in Oldham, Lancashire, England.[2] At the age of ten, Walton was accepted as a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, and he subsequently entered Christ Church of the University of Oxford as an undergraduate at the unusually early age of sixteen[3]. He was largely self-taught as a composer (poring over new scores in the Ellis Library, notably those by Stravinsky, Debussy, Sibelius and Roussel), but received some tutelage from Hugh Allen, the cathedral organist.[4] At Oxford Walton befriended two poets — Sacheverell Sitwell and Siegfried Sassoon — who would prove influential in publicizing his music.[5] Little of Walton's juvenilia survives, but the choral anthem A Litany, written when he was just fifteen, exhibits striking harmonies and voice-leading which was more advanced than that of many older contemporary composers in Britain. Perhaps the most daring harmonic features of the work are the pungent augmented-chord inflections, notably in the striking final cadence.

Walton left Oxford without a degree in 1920 for failing Responsions[6], to lodge in London with the literary Sitwell siblings — Sacheverell, Osbert and Edith — as an 'adopted, or elected, brother'[7]. Through the Sitwells, Walton became familiar with many of the most important figures in British music between the World Wars, particularly his fellow composer, Constant Lambert, and also in the arts, notably Noel Coward, Lytton Strachey, Rex Whistler, Peter Quennell, Cecil Beaton and others. Walton's first reputation was one of notoriety, built on his ground-breaking musical adaptation of Edith Sitwell's Façade poems. The 1923 first public performance of the jazz-influenced Façade resulted in Walton being branded an avant-garde modernist (the critic Ernest Newman described him thus: 'as a musical joker he is a jewel of the first water'), though the first performances stimulated a considerable amount of controversy. An early string quartet gained only slight international recognition, including a performance at the 1923 festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Salzburg, with a much appreciative Alban Berg in attendance.

During the 1920s, Walton made a modest income playing piano at jazz clubs, but spent most of his time composing in the Sitwells' attic. The orchestral overture Portsmouth Point (which he dedicated to Sassoon) was the first work to point toward his eventual accomplishments, including a strong rhythmic drive, extensive syncopation and a dissonant but predominantly tonal harmonic language. It was the Viola Concerto of 1929, however, which catapulted him to the forefront of British classical music, its bittersweet melancholy proving quite popular; it remains a cornerstone of the solo viola repertoire. This success was followed by equally acclaimed works: the massive choral cantata Belshazzar's Feast (1931), the Symphony No. 1 (1935), the coronation march Crown Imperial (1937), and the Violin Concerto (1939). Each of these works remains firmly entrenched in the repertoire today. Though Belshazzar's Feast is a cornerstone of the repertoire of any up-and-coming choral society, the First Symphony remains a challenge even to professional orchestras without generous rehearsal time to devote to it.

After World War II

During World War II, Walton was granted leave from military service in order to compose music for propagandistic films, such as The First of the Few (1942), and Laurence Olivier's adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry V (1944), which Winston Churchill encouraged Olivier to adapt as if it were a piece of morale-boosting propaganda. By the mid-1940s, the rise to fame of younger composers such as Benjamin Britten substantially curtailed Walton's reception among music critics, though the public always received his music enthusiastically. After composing a second string quartet (1946), his strongest achievement in the world of chamber music, Walton dedicated the considerable period of seven years to his three-act tragic opera, Troilus and Cressida (1947-1954). The opera was not widely acclaimed, and it was from this point that Walton's reputation as an old-fashioned composer became confirmed.

Walton also composed the music for two more Shakespeare-Olivier films - the Academy Award-winning Hamlet, and Richard III. Walton, however, did not win Oscars for any of his Shakespeare-based scores.

After Troilus and Cressida, Walton returned to orchestral music, composing in rapid succession the Cello Concerto (1956), the Symphony No. 2 (1960), and his masterpiece of the post-war period, the Variations on a Theme by Hindemith (1963). His music from the 1960s shows a great reluctance to accept the post-war avant-garde trends espoused by Pierre Boulez and others, as Walton preferred to compose in the post-Romantic style which he had found most rewarding. Indeed, he was far from forgotten, having been knighted in 1951 and received the Order of Merit in 1967. His one-act comic opera, The Bear, was well received at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1967, and commissions came from as far afield as the New York Philharmonic (Capriccio burlesco, 1968), and the San Francisco Symphony (Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten, 1969). His song-cycles from this period were premiered by artists as illustrious as Peter Pears (Anon. in love, 1960) and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table, 1962).

Walton was commissioned to write the score for the 1969 film Battle of Britain. The music was conducted by Malcolm Arnold. However, the music department at United Artists objected that the score was too short. As a result, a further score was commissioned from Ron Goodwin. Producer S. Benjamin Fisz and actor Laurence Olivier protested this decision, and Olivier threatened to take his name from the credits. In the end, one segment of the Walton score, titled The Battle in the Air, which framed the climactic air battles of 15 September 1940, was retained in the final cut. The Walton score was played with no sound effects of aircraft motors or gunfire, giving this sequence a transcendent, lyrical quality. Tapes of the Walton score were believed lost forever until being rediscovered in 1990. Since then the score has been restored and released on compact disc and also as an alternative soundtrack on a commercially released DVD of Battle of Britain.

In his final decade, Walton found composition increasingly difficult. He repeatedly tried to compose a third symphony for André Previn, but later abandoned the work. His final works are mostly re-orchestrations or revisions of earlier music, and liturgical choral music. Since his death, Walton's music has gained a resurgence of attention, both in live performance and recordings. Indeed, as the history of post-war classical music continues to be re-evaluated, Walton is seen less as an old-fashioned representative of a lost era, and more as a strong individualist who wrote in an attractive, personal idiom.

In his only acting role, he played King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony in the 1983 miniseries Wagner.

He settled on the island of Ischia in Italy in 1949 with his Argentinian wife Susana Gil, and it was at his home there that he died on 8 March 1983.

Works

Opera

Ballet

Orchestral works

Concertante works

Choral music

Chamber music

Solo vocal music

Film scores

Note: Dates listed are of musical composition, not film release.

Incidental music

  • Christopher Columbus, music for the radio play by Louis MacNeice (1942)
  • various music for theater and television

References

  1. ^ Kennedy, Michael Portrait of Walton Oxford University Press, 1989 ISBN 0-19-816705-9 p5
  2. ^ "Walton". oup.co.uk. 2007. http://www.oup.co.uk/music/repprom/walton/. Retrieved on 2007-09-13. 
  3. ^ Kennedy, p.6/7
  4. ^ Kennedy, p.9/10
  5. ^ Kennedy, p.14
  6. ^ Kennedy, p.11
  7. ^ Kennedy, p.16
  • Howes, Frank (1965). The Music of William Walton. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-315412-9. 
  • Walton, Susana (1988). William Walton: Behind the Façade. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-315156-1. 
  • Kennedy, Michael (1989). Portrait of Walton. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-816705-9. 
  • Craggs, Stewart R. (1990). William Walton: A Catalogue. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-315474-9. 
  • Burton, Humphrey, and Maureen Murray (2002). William Walton: The Romantic Loner. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-816235-9. 
  • Hayes, Malcolm, ed. (2002). The Selected Letters of William Walton. Faber and Faber (London). ISBN 0-571-20105-9. 
  • Lloyd, Stephen (2002). William Walton: Muse of Fire. Boydell (London). ISBN 0-85115-803-X. 
  • Petrocelli, Paolo (2008). William Walton: Il fascino di una voce fievole. Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana Vol.1,Rai-Eri (Rome). ISBN 88-397-1468-85. 

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Actor. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
British History. A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "William Walton".  Read more