"I may be able to manage to knock Bax of [sic] the map." Thus wrote the young William Walton, only just 30, on accepting a symphonic commission. And while it’s possible to argue that Walton succeeded in blowing most other contemporary British symphonies – including the handful that Arnold Bax had so far composed - out of the water when his First Symphony had its premieres in 1934 and 1935 (only three movements were ready by 1934; the premiere of the completed four-movement piece had to wait until November the next year), the effort of the First Symphony’s composition was one of the most musically and personally traumatic experiences of Walton's life.



This symphony is a volcanic eruption of dark, sensual passion which speaks with unmediated power from the very first bar. The first movement is one of the most unrelentingly intense experiences and most remarkable structures in 20th century music; the scherzo is a bitingly bitter Presto "con malizia" ("with malice"); the slow movement is a melancholic ache of chromatic pain; and the fourth movement is the work’s major-key apotheosis, a controversially (even unsatisfyingly, for some) upbeat finale that sings, fugues, and shouts with joy.

As Walton later admitted, music of such searing intensity came from deep within. Unlike so many other works in this series, this B flat minor symphony really did have its inspiration in events of Walton’s personal life. It’s usually a dangerous thing for a composer to draw on the immediacy of their emotional lives, to make those dark and raw materials into the foundations of a huge symphonic structure. But in the first three movements – and the opening one most of all – Walton manages exactly that, and the music is a devastating emotional wound that’s both white-hot in its intensity and ferociously compelling as a symphonic structure. The piece transmutes Walton’s frustration and fears, his doubts and anger as his relationship with Imma von Doernberg came to an end: that malicious Presto is a tempestuous feud between the two lovers. But the finale was composed later, after he had met and fallen in love with Alice Wimborne, a Viscountess and society hostess 22 years older than Walton. It’s not quite as simple as mapping emotional pain and subsequent pleasure onto the symphony’s structure, but that narrative is a crucial part of how the piece was conceived.

But it’s how all of that is translated into the music that matters. Harmonically speaking, the opening movement is built on an instability that’s sounded out right at the start in the chords that are made from the ostinato in the low strings and horns before the oboe melody begins its keening progress. The movement presents two contradictory kinds of motion and emotion at the same time: this music is simultaneously one of the most restless, driving first movements in symphonic history, and yet all of its big melodies have, I think, the character of a lament. It’s music that’s firmly set on a sea of instability, if that’s not too paradoxical; and the implicit tension in the music’s emotional and harmonic worlds produces some ear-shattering and heart-breaking climaxes, around two-thirds of the way through, and the monumental procession of pain that marks the end of the movement.



After the splintery and darkly thrilling energy of the scherzo, which explodes into climaxes that are, in a way, even more shattering than those of the first movement since they seem so empty and random, the slow movement voices a genuine and intimate regret. The opening melody was originally planned for the first allegro; slowing the tune down released its true expressive power, and this movement encloses the symphony’s most affecting, lyrical and melancholic music.



All of which private intensity and anguish makes the finale seem like a missive from another world. There’s a public, even heraldic pomp to Walton’s music in this movement, as if the grief and pain of the previous three movements had been exorcised by the symphonic struggles we’ve witnessed – or simply forgotten. He said on one hand that the finale was a "piece for the mob", and on the other, that "in some ways, I think the last movement to be the best of the lot, at anyrate[sic] it will be the most popular, I think." Whether you think of the finale, including its wildly celebratory fugue, as a vindication of Walton’s symphonic journey, or as a pomp-and-circumstance sticking plaster over an emotional wound that still gapes by the triumphant (too triumphant?) closing bars, is a question of taste, and a question of which performance you’re listening to. That it caps the most searing and emotional British symphony so far composed is, I think, not in doubt.

Five key recordings



These are all vividly compelling traversals of Walton’s symphonic masterpiece – if you can bear so much savage emotional intensity, I recommend them all.

London Symphony Orchestra/Andre Previn

Royal London Philharmonic Orchestra/Charles Mackerras

London Symphony Orchestra/Colin Davis

Philharmonia Orchestra/William Walton

English Northern Philharmonia/Paul Daniel



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