Piano Quartet (1918–19)

Sir William Walton’s long and illustrious career was founded, in a sense, on the piano quartet he began as a very young student at Oxford in 1918. It was hearing him play the slow movement that convinced fellow undergraduate Sacheverell Sitwell, younger brother of Osbert and Edith, that he was as talented as everyone said and that the family should take him under their protection. Living with the Sitwells in literary London – he would have been sent down from Oxford anyway, having failed to pass a qualifying examination – was a very different kind of education. It resulted, however, in Walton’s now famous collaboration with Edith on Façade. The first performance of Façade, in the Sitwell home in Carlyle Square in 1922, was a gratifyingly newsworthy, even scandalous event that made the composer’s reputation.

The opening bars of the Piano Quartet, the violin quietly playing a supple melody over an open fifth on the cello, give no idea of what a turbulent and even, in some respects, chaotic work it is to be. Paradoxically, however, it is that opening melody that holds the whole four-movement construction together. Although the Dorian mode, which prevails until the crashing first entry of the piano, could suggest an allegiance to English folk song, the sound image Walton had in mind, consciously or not, was the Ravel String Quartet. That much is clear from the tremolando string textures and the changes of harmony the main theme goes through before making way for new material. There are actually two second-subject themes – one sustained on viola under a more mobile violin counterpoint, the other rising and falling in piano octaves. Even so, comparatively little is heard of them in a dramatically eventful development, an abbreviated recapitulation, and a coda that ends with a quiet echo on violin of the opening bars.

The Allegro scherzando we can now recognise, with the benefit of hindsight, as a prototype of the dynamic Walton scherzo. Based on a characteristically mordent three-note motif and a more extended legato melody, it includes an artful fugato based on a muscular little derivative of the opening theme of the work and, in contrast, a recognisably English “big tune” that is to return at the climax of the movement.

Listening to the Andante tranquillo, it is not difficult to understand the enthusiasm aroused in Sacheverell Sitwell when the composer played it to him – though very badly, apparently – in his rooms in Christ Church. It is such a romantic, lyrically inspired and seductively presented concept. Although we don’t know what state it was in on that occasion, it presumbly opened with the rocking melody on the strings said to be “cribbed” (a harsh word for a probably unconscious memory of a mere two bars in the Histories naturelles) from Ravel. It probably did not contain the quiet recall, just after the central climax in the present version, of the opening theme of the work in far from Dorian harmonies on piano and then on solo cello and viola in turn.

Not surprisingly, that recurring theme has a significant part to play in the last movement. It is held in reserve, however, until the Allegro molto material, a vigorous march tune and an expressive cello melody, have been thoroughly worked out in a rhythmically thrilling and harmonically reckless development, including another fugato. It makes its definitive re-entry on the piano alongside a recall of the fugato and shares in both a moment of reflection and a high-powered drive towards the closing bars.