JAVS Fall 2022

however, he was very clearly not one of their kind. Despite living with and interacting so often with such wealthy friends, Walton was a “scrounger,” as his wife put it. 10 He had enough money to get by, but little else, and he regularly had to call on his wealthier friends to pay for routine expenses. 11 The rigid class system of England bent for no man, much less the pet “tame composer” that a household of artistic intelligentsia kept in their attic. 12 This is the stage for the Viola Concerto. On one hand, William was rubbing elbows and clinking glasses with lords and ladies and their soon-to-be heirs; but on the other, he was merely part of their aristocratic entourage. This important context serves to deepen our understanding of Walton’s involvement with Christabel McLaren—or perhaps more properly, Lady Christabel McLaren. Recall that she was noble-born and married to a baron. In other words, she was way out of Walton’s league. It is no wonder that whatever they had didn’t last. One can only imagine that Walton was keenly aware of his status as a black sheep, an ugly duckling, in the elite of London. Despite how far he had come from his humble origins in Oldham, a place he had tried so hard to escape, perhaps his failure to pursue Christabel represented to him the glass ceiling between him and the unattainable true belonging he sought in his new home. This is the

narrative I argue Walton embedded in his Viola Concerto. An analysis of the concerto strongly suggests that it records Walton’s feelings of dysphoria, despair, and angst at having failed to transcend his commoner status—in life, and perhaps in love. Analysis of the First Movement Having reviewed the evidence on Walton’s early life and with a hypothesis of a narrative for the concerto in hand, I will now turn to an analysis of the first movement to demonstrate that this narrative is in fact embedded in the concerto itself. I will begin by examining the very opening of the movement through the relatively new framework of topic theory. Topic theory centers around the identification, analysis, and manipulation of “topics,” musical figures or styles which audiences have learned to associate with some real-world meaning or connotation. 13 This sounds rather abstract and arcane, but with the aid of an example, it will doubtlessly become intuitive. For example, imagine low strings, playing a slowly descending chromatic scale. What comes to mind? Sadness or despair? That chromatic scale pattern is a topic called the “lament bass,” which in this case carries the association of grief and lamentation. Any time a listener heard this bass line, they would immediately understand that the subject of the music was grief and mourning, whether it was explicitly

Fig. 1: Walton Viola Concerto I. mm.4-7. 14

Fig. 2: Walton Viola Concerto I. mm. 4-7.

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 38, No. 2, Fall 2022