Gaze up at the ceiling of Oldham’s Spindles shopping centre and you will see an enormous stained glass roof, designed to celebrate a local musician and composer.
The roof is one of the largest stained glass examples in Europe, and the variety of colours is fantastic.It is dedicated to Sir William Walton born in the town in 1902 and who would become one of the three indisputable leaders of the first generation of 20th century British composers joining Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten
Perhaps not many people have heard of him but we tell his story.
William was born at the end of March at 93, Werneth Hall Road. His father Charles one of the first intake in 1893 at the new Royal Manchester College of Music, where he was a bass-baritone pupil. He became organist and choirmaster at St John’s Church, Werneth, for twenty one years and also taught singing and the organ elsewhere. His wife Louisa , was a good amateur contralto.
William and his elder brother sung in the Choir at St John’s where he also learnt to play the piano and the violin.
At the age of ten, he was entered for a voice trial for probationer choristers at Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford.
The story goes that he missed his train and arrive late whereby his mother pleaded for him to be heard and the organist, Dr H.G.Ley, accepted him after he sang Marcello’s ‘O Lord Our Governor’.
His first term was not pleasant, made ‘odious’ for him because of his Lancashire accent, which he later learned to conceal although never quite entirely.
The First World War could have ended his career, the Cathedral school was almost disbanded but William was saved by Dr Thomas Strong, Dean of Christ Church, who, recognizing the boy’s talents paid the balance of the school fees not met by the scholarship.
He returned to Oldham during his holidays and his father would take him to Hallé concerts in Manchester and he attended performances of Sir Thomas Beecham’s famous opera seasons in Manchester in 1916 and 1917.
By this time William was already composing anthems and songs, and at the age of sixteen was writing a piano quartet written at the age of sixteen. He had made the acquaintance of the Sitwells, Sacheverell Sitwell was an undergraduate at the same time, who gave him friendship, moral and financial support. He went to stay with them in London, where later he would collaborate with Edith in devising the entertainment Façade where eighteen of Edith’s poems were recited over a background of Walton’s music scored originally for five instrumentalists.
It was performed in public in 1923 with the poems declaimed through a megaphone thrust through a painted curtain and unsurprisingly quickly caught the attention of the London crowd.
The Piano Quartet was first performed in 1924, meanwhile Walton earned some money by making arrangements of foxtrots for Debroy Somers’s band at the Savoy Hotel. In 1925, he began to compose his overture Portsmouth Point, followed by a Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra, with each movement dedicated to one of the Sitwells.
The Viola Concerto followed in 1929, written at Amalfi in Italy and intended for Lionel Tertis, who first rejected it but would perform it at a Promenade Concert in 1929.
It is regarded as Walton’s masterpiece, and at the age of 27, he found himself in the forefront of English composers of his generation
Two years later, his cantata Belshazzar’s Feast was introduced at the 1931 Leeds Festival, its text selected from the Old Testament by Osbert Sitwell and much of it written in Amalfi and at Ascona, Switzerland, where Walton was living with a German baroness, Imma von Doernberg.
A visit to Manchester in 1932 to see his viola concerto performed by the Hallé led to its conductor, Sir Hamilton Harty, asking him to write a symphony.
His personal life was interrupt the composition, his relationship with Imma ended and he became involved with Viscountess Wimborne, 22 years older than he and one of London’s society hosts and its first performance was cancelled.
Hearty, now conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, decided to perform the three completed movements anyway in December 1934. Walton completed the Finale during 1935 and the full work was performed on 6 November that year.
A fellow composer wrote to Walton: ‘It has established you as the most vital and original genius in Europe’. He wrote the march for King George VI’s Coronation in 1937, Crown Imperial, is a by-product of this style.
The war years were devoted mainly to writing film and ballet scores. Films included the memorable First of the Few from which Walton extracted the ‘Spitfire’ Prelude and Fugue, and the ballets were The Wise Virgins (1940) and The Quest (1943), both for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. In 1944 came the music for the first of Laurence Olivier’s major Shakespearean films, Henry V. Hamlet followed in 1948 and Richard III in 1955.
The end of the war saw a change in the musical landscape, Walton was no longer the golden boy.Nevertheless in 1947 the BBC commissioned an opera from him. He chose Chaucer’s subject of Troilus and Cressida but before he had written a note, Alice Wimbourne died in April 1948.
Walton would compose a Violin Sonata in his grief as well as revising Belshazzar’s Feast, before later that year, journeying to Buenos Aires as a delegate to an international conference of the Performing Right Society.
There he met and married Susana Gil Passo, who was 24 years his junior. He informed her they would live for six months of every year in Italy. They went to the island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples, and settled there permanently.
In the grounds of the house they eventually built there, La Mortella, Susana Walton created one of the most wonderful gardens in the world.
He continued to compose nonetheless, completing his trilogy of string concertos in 1956 with a Cello Concerto. In 1960 came the first performance of Symphony No.2 and 1969, The Bear, a one-act ‘extravaganza’ to a Chekhov-based libretto by Paul Dehn.
He died on Ischia just short of his 81st birthday, in some ways resentful of his home country, feeling that he was considered old hat.He has been knighted in 1951 and in 1968 received the Order of Merit.
His wife would survive until 2010, founding the William Walton Foundation, with the twin objectives of supporting the vocational training of young musicians and caring for the garden at La Mortella.She also persuaded Oxford University Press to institute a 26-volume complete edition of his works.
