Caught in the Middle

Why I Love William Walton

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I love the English classical composer Sir William Turner Walton. Or rather, I love half of him.

That isn’t a comment on his physical size, which was indeed generous. What I mean is that I love half of his output. To say it another way: Of his two compositional styles, I love one of them and could very well live without the other.

The String Quartet in A Minor and the Viola Concerto? Adore them. To a lesser extent the Violin Concerto and the first Symphony.

The oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast and the ballet Façade? If he had never written them at all, it would be no great loss, in my opinion. Same with his processional marches and most of his piano music. And most of his film scores.

The main difference between the two styles? The first one is ‘Romantic’ and, in the end, traditionally harmonic, though there are plenty of strange chords along the way. The second is rather ‘in your face’ aggressively non-traditional, both beginning and ending with ‘odd’ harmonies.

Is this dichotomy of styles a result of the passage of time, of a temporal change in the composer’s approach to composition? Not at all. There are only two years between the Viola Concerto and Belshazzar’s Feast, for example, while there’s a fifteen year gap between the first version of that Concerto and the aforementioned String Quartet. (The concerto, written in 1929, was revised in 1961, but the ‘revision’ is in actuality merely a re-orchestration. The solo part wasn’t changed at all.)

No, the difference has nothing to do with when the pieces were written. It has to do with the composer having a hard time deciding who he was, who he wanted to be. As a composer myself, though far from his level, I find myself caught in the same dilemma that he was in. Am I looking forward or backward? Am I a traditionalist or am I avante-garde?

In understanding the problem, we need to think for a moment about when he lived. Born in March of 1902, and living till March of 1983 (he failed by twenty-one days from reaching his 81st birthday), he lived through the most revolutionary period in classical music history — the change from tonality to atonality, and the alteration from listener-centric music to a more composer-centric approach. And the resultant change from classical being the ‘popular music’ of its time to being the realm of the elite.

The composer who invented the ‘twelve-tone’ technique in music composition, which is considered the ultimate expression of atonality, was Arnold Schoenberg, whose Suite for Piano in 1921 was the first piece ever to use the technique ‘pure,’ that is, without any other influence in the music. Walton was nineteen at the time, and had already created several compositions in the more familiar tonal style. While he never subscribed to ‘serialism,’ as Schoenberg’s new approach came to be called, it definitely had an effect on him.

The big difference between the Second Viennese School, which Schoenberg founded, and the more traditional tonal styles of the late 19th centrury, was the difference in attitude toward ‘dissonance.’ (The word means, more or less, ‘lack of harmony.’) Up until Schoenberg, dissonances had to be ‘resolved.’ (A musical ‘resolution’ is the change from an unpleasant sound to a pleasant one.) Schoenberg felt that dissonances had just as much right to exist as traditional harmony did, and composed accordingly, often ending a piece with an extreme dissonance that lingered in the listener’s ear long after the performance was over.

In order to understand what was going on in musical culture at the time of this evolution, we need to back up a hair and return to an earlier time in music history, an era I like to call ‘Brahms versus Wagner.’ (Some people refer to it as ‘The War of the Romantics.’) If you’re already familiar with that debate and its outcome, feel free to skip the next several paragraphs.

Beethoven had died in 1827, and, except for a few composers in France, was by 1850 the ‘hero’ of classical music. He was everyone’s inspiration. New composers were compared to him. In different ways, music students tried to emulate him.

In 1860, a young Viennese composer named Johannes Brahms went to hear an opera composed by another Viennese composer, Richard Wagner. The opera was called Tannhäuser, and was a great example of Beethoven-inspired composition. Brahms was 27 years old at the time, and Wagner was 47. Yet, strangely, it was the older Wagner who was being thought of (and rightly so) as revolutionary, while Brahms was considered old-fashioned, even anachronistic. Three years later, the two of them met, for the first and only time, at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Vienna. Brahms was invited to perform something of his own composition, and he chose his Variations on a Theme of Handel.

Wagner was polite, but basically un-interested. He found the piece boring and much too backward-looking. He, himself, on the other hand, had recently completed his revolutionary Tristan und Isolde, with its now-famous Liebestod (‘Love-Death’ in Engish), which postpones its final harmonic resolution for nearly thirty minutes! (This approach to composition has now come to be referred to as ‘chromaticism,’ meaning ‘colorful.’)

Brahms considered Tristan to be the ‘destruction of music,’ which, so far as traditional music was concerned, eventually turned out to be accurate.

While both of them idolized Beethoven, it was for two different reasons: Wagner loved the fact that Beethoven had ended the ‘Classic’ period of Haydn and Mozart and had pioneered the ‘Romantic Era.’ (Cultureal Romanticism, by the way, has nothing to do with ‘romantic’ in the lovey-dovey sense. Think of it as Roman-ish, that is, having to do with the Roman emphasis on feeling, as opposed to the classical Greek emphasis on thought.)

Brahms thought of Beethoven as someone who had synthesized the Classic era and brought it to a natural outgrowth of itself that became the Romantic era. In other words, Brahms considered Beethoven to be the culmination of something, rather than the end of it. And he considered himself to be the culmination of the Classic plus the Romantic eras. Or at least that was his goal. Anything smacking of the avante-garde was anathema to him. Which, in his opinion, Wagner did, though he remained on polite terms with the older musician.

The two composers may have remained respectful of each other. Their fans did not! There were riots in the streets of Vienna. (You have to remember that classical music in those days was still ‘popular’ music as well.) Were you for Wagner or were you for Brahms? If your views were the opposite of mine, then you were my enemy! There were actual fist-fights about it.

Imagine that a coterie of Taylor Swift fans ran into a similar group of Beyoncé devotees. Whatever happened would be tame compared to the ‘War of the Romantics’!

Eventually, Wagner won. There were far more new composers emulating him than there were those who idolized Brahms, of which only Dvorak and Elgar have remained famous. (There are dozens of famous ones in the Wagnerian school.)

One of the many who followed Wagner was Arnold Schoenberg. His Verklarte Nacht (‘Transfigured Night’), in 1899, was about as chromatic as a person could get and still be tonal, and he himself rebelled against it, going to an almost opposite extreme with his twelve-tone approach, which was even more chromatic in one sense, but totally atonal in another.

‘Tone-row’ music, championed by Schoenberg (after his rebellion against his own extreme chromatic tonalities), though it had very little direct influence on other composers, except those within his own circle, did affect everybody else in one way. Unresolved dissonance became acceptable, and was a trademark of sorts for revolutionary composers such as Stravinsky and Bartôk.

And Walton.

Because he liked the idea of being a rebel, of being thought of as forward-thinking and ‘different.’ When critics of his early music dismissed it as ‘drivel’ or as an ‘absurd joke,’ as two of his reviewers put it. Walton welcomed the put-downs, and felt that they made him ‘legitimate.’

But a part of him still hankered for the old Wagnerian chromaticism that could be dissonant and tonal at the same time. In other words, he liked looking ‘backward,’ though in some ways that made him more akin to Brahms than to Brahms’ rival.

So every now and then he indulged that more traditional streak, and wrote things like the Viola Concerto and the String Quartet. And that’s the side of him I love, though I also like to think of myself as forward-looking at times. I’m ambivalent. So was he. That might be the only thing we have in common, but that’s why I love him!

He was caught in the middle, and so am I. I much prefer Brahms, but I can see what people love about Wagner, and I totally understand why he’s so much more influential than Brahms. Walton preferred Wagner, but he often acted more like Brahms!

Although he’s not my favorite composer (that would be Jean Sibelius), Walton’s Viola Concerto is my number-one go-to when it’s time to listen to something at once both peaceful and stirring, and both contemporary and traditional. If you’ve never heard it, I suggest you give it a try.

Here’s a link.

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This is a good performance. But my favorite is the one by Nigel Kennedy with Andre Previn conducting. Both are of the 1961 revised version.

The only recording I know of that uses the original 1929 version has William Primrose on viola. I have it on 78rpm but can’t find it in any modern playable form.