If Winter leaves you with a long face, imagine what it was like to be Edith Sitwell and William Walton. Both had very long faces indeed.

It was on this day 100 years ago that Walton’s “Façade” was first performed at Sitwell’s home. An eccentric poet from an eccentric family of artistically-inclined English aristocrats, Sitwell also participated in the work’s first public performance, on June 12, 1923. She declaimed her verses through a megaphone from behind a painted screen to the accompaniment of a seven-piece jazz band.

Cheekily, Walton set the poems to popular dance-styles of the period, with breakneck allusions to and quotations from other composers. The music is protean in its invention, encompassing paso doble and patter song, waltz, foxtrot, and mazurka. The texts are nonsense, most immediately striking for their rhythmic value – the settings are as much about the abstract SOUND of words as they are about their meaning – but once the listener acclimates, they actually do start to make a kind of sense.

The June premiere was a succés de scandale, with much pearl-clutching and face-fanning by public and press alike. Needless to say, the work’s notoriety ensured its frequent revival.

Worlds away from the coronation marches and Shakespeare scores for which Walton would be so well remembered, the music from “Façade” is also among his most popular. It is perhaps even more frequently performed without the texts. The composer arranged two suites for orchestra. In 1931, Frederick Ashton choreographed the piece as a ballet.

Walton would go on receive a knighthood in 1951. Sitwell would be awarded a damehood in 1954. So it is that yesterday’s eccentricity becomes today’s respectability.

There must be something to it, if it could make dour Paul Scofield sound like this, in my favorite recording of the work:

Sitwell and Constant Lambert in the first recording in 1929. Is this the English “Pierrot Lunaire?”

Selections from Sitwell’s later recording, from 1953, with Peter Pears:

Having attained respectability, the orchestral suites:

An interview with Dame Edith Sitwell:

Walton remembers the Sitwells and the Roaring ‘20s:

Dame Edith, English eccentric:

http://thedabbler.co.uk/2011/04/edith-sitwell-and-the-english-eccentrics/