Walton's Façade and Its Descendants

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WILLIAM WALTON'S (1902-1983) FAÇADE represents an amalgamation of avant garde and popular music styles of the 1910s and 1920s. It was originally conceived in late 1921 as "An Entertainment" for chamber ensemble and speaker.1 However, over the course of Walton's career, it went through many additions, revisions, and deletions. Despite the continued presence the work had in Walton's compositional output, an investigation of all its incarnations and their relationships to each other is lacking.

Façade began as a collection of several pieces for reciter, flute and piccolo, clarinet and bass clarinet, alto saxophone, trumpet, percussion, and cello. The poetry is by Edith Sitwell …