Author Description

Edith Sitwell wrote her Façade poems as studies in rhythms and onomatopoeia. They may appear to be nonsensical, but a continuous thread of allusions and images runs through them and evokes bourgeois culture of turn-of-the-century England. The poet and her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell decided they would be suitable for a drawing-room entertainment, a highbrow extension of country-house charades, and ought therefore to be accompanied by music. They had a tame composer on the premises, but Walton was uncertain what was required and demurred. They had an answer to this: they would ask another of their protégés, the 17-year-old Constant Lambert. The prospect of rivalry was always to act as a spur to Walton he began to work. Walton himself said that Façade was Edith’s idea. ‘She began writing things like the Hornpipe as a deliberate kind of exercise. Then when she read it to us, Sachie said: “This would be much better if you had music with it.” If you do a kind of whistle at the Hornpipe, then you see it first in. It developed from that.’ It is misleading to regard Façade only as frivolous and unrepresentative. It is unique and unrepeatable, as Walton wisely realized, but it contains the essence of him—even to the ‘conservatism’ which earned him so much disrepute in advance circles, for what is one to say of an enfant terrible who was so obviously poking fun, witty and elegant fun, at the modish Parisian-type up-to-dateness in which had been immersed up to the neck? Yet most remarkable of all—in retrospect—is the work’s poetic vein of nostalgia which is not something that has been added by the passing of years. For all that Façade is rightly called an ‘entertainment’, for all its hornpiping, its fanfares, its music-hall parodies, its mock-Rossini and jodelling, for all its wit and skittishness, beneath and through these there runs an awareness of true romance—magical like a spell—evoking warmth of feeling as well as sharpness of satire.