10 things you didnt know about walton
TRANSCRIPT
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10 things you didn’t know about…
Walton
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Although William Walton went up to Oxford to study music, he left without a degree in 1920, having failed his exams three times.
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His early choral masterpiece, A Litany, was written when
the composer was just 15.
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Walton befriended the war poet Siegfried
Sassoon at Oxford, and dedicated his
Portsmouth Point overture to him.
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In 1948, Walton met the 22-year-old Susana Gil Passo in Buenos Aires
while on a business trip. After dinner one
evening, Walton is said to have told
her ‘You will be very surprised, Miss Gil, to hear that I am
going to marry you.’
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La Mortella, the Waltons’ home in Ischia, is open to the public – tours were conducted by his wife, Susana, up until her death in 2007.
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Walton received the Order of Merit in 1967, the fourth composer to be awarded the honour. There can be only 24 recipients of the award at any one time.
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William Walton wrote the music for the 1969 film Battle of Britain but it only on reading a copy of the Daily Telegraph
that Walton discovered his music had been rejected in favour of a score by Ron Goodwin
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When Elgar died in 1934, the British authorities asked Walton to write a piece for the coronation of George
VI. Crown Imperial was unashamedly populist, and many of Walton’s
admirers, who believed the composer to be an avant-garde musician,
were disappointed.
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Benjamin Britten and Walton were close friends –
Walton considered Britten a genius, but the compliment wasn’t reciprocated.
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Walton wrote the music for the opening sequence of the BBC’s television adaptations of Shakespeare plays which were broadcast between 1978 and 1985, by which time the composer had died.
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