3 Songs to Poems by Edith Sitwell

Daphne

Through gilded trellises

Old Sir Faulk

The work done by William Walton on Façade when he was barely in his twenties - to create with Edith Sitwell a uniquely inspired “entertainment” for reciter and instrumental ensemble - set him up for life. First of all, even though early performances met with as much derision as anything else, it made his name for him. Then, although it would be a long time before a definitive version was finalised, both during and after that process of addition and subtraction Façade proved to be a useful source not only of income but also of material for other works - the two Façade Suites for orchestra, two Façade ballets, a piano Valse, these three songs, and even (in 1977) “a further entertainment” Façade 2.

The idea of re-setting some of Edith Sitwell’s Façade poems as songs rather than as recitations seems to have occurred to Walton in 1923 or 1924, when he scored five of them for voice and six instruments and put them together under the Sitwellian title Bucolic Comedies. That collection remained unpublished, however, and it wasn’t several years later that he finally selected three of them and re-arranged them for voice and piano - in which form they were first performed by their dedicatees Dora and Hubert Foss in the Wigmore Hall in 1932.

A reciter version of Daphne had appeared in one early version of Façade but had then, like many others, been dropped - probably because its gentle, modally inflected lyricism had proved too fragile in the company of the more extrovert pieces around it. Certainly, it makes a fragrant and expressive little song. The reciter version of Through gilded Trellises was included in Façade not from the very start but was added for the first public performance at the Aeolian Hall in 1923 and has retained its place ever since: its evocations of musical Andalusia - which acquire a new poetic subtlety in the voice-and-piano version - are too colourful and too witty to leave out. Old Sir Faulk has been a favourite Façade item since it was first included in the entertainment in 1926, not least because (like Popular Song which made its first appearance two years later) it is such a brilliant and at the same time affectionate parody of the dance-hall music of the day. It is a no less crazy a foxtrot in the voice-and-piano version where it has the added attraction of offering the singer a golden opportunity to indulge in the period idiom.

Gerald Larner©2002