Trivia

One of the best known and most honored of all twentieth-century British composers, as acclaimed for his film and theatre scores as for his concert works.

His wife was the Argentinian beauty, Susana Walton. The couple never had children, but lived together on an island in the South of Italy in their spectacular garden, La Mortella, until his death in 1983. Long after his death, Susana Walton held music master-classes there.

He was made a Knight Bachelor in the 1950 King's New Year Honours List for his services to music.

He was awarded the O.M. (Order of Merit) in November 1967 for his services to music.

After a long absence from film work, he was hired to compose the music for La Bataille d'Angleterre (1969). He composed a full score, but it was rejected by the producers, who then hired Ron Goodwin to compose an entirely new one. This cavalier act toward a distinguished artist so angered his friend Laurence Olivier, who played the largest and most important role in the film, that Olivier immediately demanded that his own name be removed from the credits of the film and from all advertising, refusing also to do any promotional work for the film. This so alarmed the producers that they eventually agreed to a compromise, whereby some twelve minutes of Walton's score were used on the soundtrack, with full credit.

A heavy pipe-smoker, Walton underwent surgery and radiation treatment for lung cancer in 1966. The procedures beat the cancer but left him with a weakened immune system and difficulties eating and drinking. Susana Walton lamented in her book that she could no longer hug her husband because it was physically painful for him.

Viscountess Lady Alice Wimborne was Walton's partner from 1934 until her death in 1948. She was 22 years the composer's senior and in an open marriage with the accommodating Viscount Wimborne. The legacy she left him helped Walton build his new home on the Italian island of Ischia in the 1950s.

In 1925, Walton and fellow composer Constant Lambert went to Paris together to meet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, each armed with a new ballet they hoped he would produce. Only Lambert's was bought for the Ballets Russes. Walton turned his rejected score into the Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra (1927); it has never rated highly among his works.

When Walton received his Knighthood in 1951, he impishly told his Argentinian father-in-law, Enrique, that he only accepted the honor "to make a lady of your daughter". Not getting the joke - that Susana Walton would henceforth be known as Lady Walton - Enrique shouted, "My daughter has always been a lady!".

In 1923 a student work by Walton, a string quartet heavily influenced by the Second Viennese School, was premiered at the ISCM Festival in Salzburg, Austria. Composer Alban Berg liked it well enough to introduce Walton to his mentor, Arnold Schönberg. Walton withdrew the score immediately afterwards and never wrote another atonal opus. The quartet was thought lost for many years until it was unearthed and performed in 1993.