Book Description
When in June 1923 a bewildered audience in London's Aeolian Hall heard Edith Sitwell declaim her Façade poems through a megaphone, the 21-year-old William Walton - conducting behind a painted backcloth - stood on the threshold of fame. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he was regarded as the white hope of British music, and a succession of works including the Viola Concerto, Belshazzar's Feast and the First Symphony more than fulfilled that early promise; he was also one of the first serious composers to be involved in films. Using first-hand accounts, this book explodes the myth of Façade's riotous reception, examines Walton's work in both films and radio and, through contemporary correspondence, articles and interviews - wherever possible in his own words - explores Walton's life and troubled times. It brings to the fore his complex personality - 'remote, removed, distant' in Laurence Olivier's words, in dynamic contrast with music of such vitality and drama. Composition for him was an arduous, often painful, process riddled with difficulties, uncertainties and self-doubts, and further complicated by several love affairs (one being with Italy) that inspired his finest works.STEPHEN LLOYD's previous books include a biography of H. Balfour Gardiner and a collection of Eric Fenby's writings on Delius, which he edited. In addition to record sleeve notes, programme notes, reviews and articles, he has contributed to the Percy Grainger Companion/I>, the Studies in Music Grainger Centennial Volume, An Elgar Companion, and volumes on Delius, Walton and Bliss. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

All together-- the poems are even better
I'm not going to attempt to talk about WCW's poetry or I could be writing for hours... rather this review is about the volume of "collected" poems as a book to read. Yes it includes some dubious items and some debris we would expect from any serious and innovative writer... but there are mostly successes here and well worth reading. Especially informative is observing WCW's development as a writer and thinker and his daring as a poet and his striving for new ways to express the response of an artist to the swelling tide of modernity and cultural failures of the 20th century.

Intense Words and Feelings
How can one describe William Carlos Williams, a great brilliant writer. His words are so in depth and so meaning and can relate to any particular situation one might be in. His use of language is superior above others. Not until recently did I read something of his in a collection of poems that I had borrowed, and I saw one poem that stuck out to me. This poem is called Romance Moderne. This is a truly excellent poem and led me to be such a great admirer of William Carlos Williams. I've borrowed his collection of poems almost a thousand times from the library, and I still haven't finished reading all of his poems. It takes a necessary amount of time to soak in his words, and with such a great number of poems, I'd like to soak them all in, thus I will be buying the book for myself to have.

The foundation ofWCW'sart
Whew, check out that list. This is the foundation of Williams' art, for fans of his selected & Pictures from Brughel.

This is the development of Williams' daily art, fine poems punctuated by an occasional masterpiece or near-surrealistic gemstone. Someone once asked John Cage, "With your methods, couldn't anyone compose music?" Cage replied, "Yes, but they don't." With Williams, it almost seems that everyone did, by the 1950s.Williams was better at setting examples than at explaining methods. He learned & invented as he wrote, & I suspect his talk & his letters had a great deal more influence than his occasional stabs at poetics.

Williams stripped down American poesy & reconstructed it as a form of talk, which it had been all along beneath Whitman's yawping & Dickinson's obsessive editing & Frost hiking though New England snow five steps at a time.Like all great American originals, he didn't know he was supposed to be a somebody-else; maybe a Stephen Benet, a William Vaughn Moody, an Edwin Arlington Robinson, all big literary stars in their time but not now counted in the first ranks of our poets.

This is roughly the first half of The Doc's amazin' journey. You'll know if you need it. Any intelligent poet friend will love it as a gift.

Intense
The overall strength of Williams' work lies in his power to summon image from where there was previously nothing.

Forget about the conventional tactics of poetry (meter, rhyme, etc.).Williams effectively occupies theouter regions of the land which is not prose.His power always properlylay in the simple yet vivid images (visual, aural, tactile, etc.) behindthe words.

I've a grudging respect for the man as a poet.
I don't know what it is about WCW that just makes me want to puke. Perhaps it's his nice-guy, nice "poet" pretensions.I do see thesense in those aphorisms about which he was constantly pontificating: "No ideas but in things", "For there to be a new mind, theremust be a new line" (sic).I do see the technical innovations in suchpoems as "Iris" or "The Red Wheelbarrow", how theenjambment for which he's famous serves to direct the eye and the mind tothings which you would not have noticed had these prose poems beenunchopped:"So much depends

Upon

A red wheel

Barrow,

Glazed with rain

Water

Beside the white

Chickens."

Very nice.The vivid white of the chickens and theshining-glass image of the water that "glazes" (one of WCW'sfavorite words) the wheelbarrow is imbued with immediacy and novelty: fresh experiences with commonplace things.That's great.

However, Ihave trouble with his "variable foot".(Employed, for example,in a poem called, I believe, "Mr. T" though not of A-Team fame.) The whole point of meter is to emulate the measure-bars in music:aconstant beat to which the tune may be set.However, the triadic linesporting his variable feet, ostensibly to account for the "rapidity ofAmerican speech", just doesn't work.The only way for it to work isif you were reading Mr. T, or if the speaker gave infinitesimally shorterpauses between the triad-fragments so that the listener can detect thedifference between a line-break and a pause separating the feet.WCWfocused so much on the visual aspect of his poems that it makes you wonder,as a formalist friend of mine once put it, why he bothered to read hispoems at all:why didn't WCW just give slideshows? On top of that, WCW hadthe gall to assault formalist poetry:I quote to the best of myrecollection:"The sonnet is the form of the tyrant" and"You cannot write a sonnet without making gestures of loyalty to thecourt of Elizabeth I." In response to some of the garbage beingspouted by WCW, both on the page and otherwise, Dylan Thomas once referredto WCW as one of the modern poets who was responsible for the Death of theEar.And, hearing about all his arty posturings, I imagine how WCW wouldstand up to the likes of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Robert Conquest,Elizabeth Jennings, and the other Movement poets, who would have lit intohim like Alex's droogs in Burgess' _A Clockwork Orange_. Too bad they nevermet. ... Read more

Book Description
Almost two decades after his death Walton's reputation is higher than ever - many of his masterworks remain firm favourites in the concert repertoire, notably his eloquent concertos for violin, viola and cello, his dramatic cantata Belshazzar's Feast, his vivid film scores (such as Henry V), his powerful First Symphony (the creative outcome of a tempestuous love affair) and the sparkling entertainment Facade, a brilliant divertissement based on Edith Sitwell's poems and composed before he was twenty.Born in the cotton town of Oldham, young Billie's life was transformed when he won a boy chorister's scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford.He soon lost his Lancashire accent but never his innate canniness.His remarkable creative gifts were spotted early both by Hubert Parry (of "Jerusalem" fame) and the intellectually adventurous circle surrounding the Sitwell family, who persuaded him, since he was determined not to return to the narrow confines of life in Oldham, that he should quit Oxford without a degree to live with them in Jazz-Age London and earn his living purely as a composer.He stuck to music but it made him only a pittance, however, and he became a self-acknowledged scrounger, lodging with the Sitwells for over ten years.His evident genius and his romantic good looks saw him taken up by rich admirers such as the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the rich industrialist Samuel Corutauld, to whose mistress, Christabel Aberconway, he dedicated his first orchestral masterpiece, the 1929 Viola Concerto.His idyllic relationship with a beautiful but impecunious German princess ended in an emotional turmoil that held up completion of his First Symphony for over a year.Walton then became the lover of a woman 22 years his senior, Alice, Viscountess Wimborne, a powerful society hostess who guided his career and chose the librettist, Christopher Hassall, for his first opera Troilus and Cressida. Within a year of her death in 1948 (when he was 46) he met the vivacous 22 year old Susana Gil Passo and they married after a whirlwind courtship.On their honeymoon he announced that he did not want children and intended to live in Italy.They settled on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, eventually acquiring a plot of rocky hillside land upon which they developed the villas and estate of La Mortella, now one of Italy's best-known gardens.A professional composer to his fingertips, always writing to commission, Walton's critical reputation sagged during his self-imposed Italian exile.But he demonstrated an uncanny flair for tapping a patriotic vein in such popular works as Crown Imperial, Orb and Sceptre and the Coronation Te Deum. A knighthood awarded in 1951 was followed by other honours, notably the Order of Merit.His final years were dogged by ill health - including a near fatal attack of lung cancer - and by a depressing sense of creative impotence; lack of inspiration forced him to abandon plans in his seventies to compose a Third Symphony.The authors Humphrey Burton and Maureen Murray worked with Walton on Ischia and have retained their Waltonian links since his death in 1983: she is curator of the Walton Archive and he is a member of the Walton Trust.With their shared background in television documentarythey have adopted a filmic approach to this new pictorial biography.Each of its eight chapters opens with a succinct descriptive essay highlighting Walton's life and his significant musical achievements: the narrative text is followed by many pages of illustrations, in which portraits by Cecil Beaton, Bill Brandt, Norman Parkinson and many others are interspersed with hitherto unpublished family photographs, music manuscript, press cuttings, playbills etc., all accompanied by commentary, reminiscences, anecdotes and liberal quotations from Walton's typically trenchant letters and self-deprecating interviews for radio and television.Much more than a coffee-table book, this centenary tribute conveys the essence of Walton's personality and provides a measure of his colossal artistic achievement.It will be essential reading for all lovers of his music and students of twentieth century musical life. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume prints both of Walton's orchestrations: his initial scoring (1929) and his reduced orchestrations of 1962. It also for the first time restores the solo part as edited by Frederick Riddle, an early soloist and champion of the work, who devised numerous idiomatic phrasings and bowings with the approval of the composer. The volume is completed by critical notes, facsimiles, and an introduction. Full performing material for both orchestrations is available from the Hire Library. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's preservation reformatting program. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's preservation reformatting program. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's preservation reformatting program. ... Read more

Book Description
This edition of Walton's first symphony has been offprinted from the William Walton Edition full score, and combines the scholarship of the Edition with the practical benefits of a study score format. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Cineaste, published by Cineaste Publishers, Inc. on March 22, 2004. The length of the article is 1075 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: William Walton: Muse of Fire.(Book Review)
Author: Royal S. Brown
Publication: Cineaste (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2004
Publisher: Cineaste Publishers, Inc.
Volume: 29Issue: 2Page: 88(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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