JAVS Fall 2022

We may never know for sure what it was about Walton’s relationship with Christabel Aberconway that warranted writing his first true masterpiece about it. But we might guess that of the many reasons such an a air would not have worked, one was the enormous gulf between the commoner Walton and his aristocratic would-be lover, a gulf that punctuated the foreignness he must have felt in his new surroundings. Indeed, born poor in rural Northwest Britain, there was a massive class divide between Walton and his aristocratic peers in Oxford and London, one he would have been keenly aware of - and which might have been exacerbated by his relationship with Christabel. That this narrative is definitely what Walton had in mind when he wrote the Viola Concerto cannot be proven; what I hope to have shown, however, is that, given the musical culture and compositional norms of Walton’s time, his own life, and a close reading of the text itself, it is certainly plausible that this is the story he was trying to tell. His artful juxtaposition of the lament and pastorale topics in the opening of the concerto paint a vivid picture of the isolated commoner in the elite of London, giving way to a journey through his life and culminating in a rejection of closure that may very well represent the turbulence and dysphoria he felt at the time. Although it is impossible to truly verify the story of William Walton’s unrequited love for Christabel Aberconway that has captured the imagination of viola players everywhere, it has done so with good reason. With this article, I o er an additional wrinkle to the story, and a glimpse into the mind of a young man who has strived so hard to escape the conditions of his birth, only to find himself in a world that never truly accepted him for who he was. Footnotes: 1 Kennedy, Portrait of Walton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 49. 2 Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Walton , 49. 3 “Christabel Lady Aberconway” (Clan Macnaughton), accessed June 8, 2021, http://clanmacnaughton. net/docs_articles/CHRISTABEL%20LADY%20 ABERCONWAY.pdf, 2. 4 Susana Walton, William Walton: Behind the Facade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 53; Malcolm Hayes, ed., The Selected Letters of William Walton (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), 38. 5 Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Walton , 74.

6 Examples of this can be found in Kennedy, Portrait of Walton , 7, and a letter sent by Walton to his mother in Hayes, The Selected Letters of WilliamWalton , 11. 7 Kennedy, Portrait of Walton , 4-16. 8 Susana Walton, WilliamWalton: Behind the Facade , 50. 9 Ibid., 47. 10 Ibid. , 50. 11 A prime example of this can be found in Hayes, The Selected Letters of William Walton , 45. 13 Walton, Behind the Facade ., 27. 13 For a more rigorous treatment of this subject, see Leonard G. Ratner, “Topical Content in Mozart’s Keyboard Sonatas,” Early Music 19, no. 4 (1991): 615–19 and Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 14 All score excepts are from the original 1929 edition, reproduced from William Walton, Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, ed. Christopher Wellington, vol. 12, The William Walton Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2922), 1-3. 15 A formal definition of the lament topic can be found in William Caplin, “Topics and Formal Functions,” The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, November 6, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199841578.013.0016. 16 Janice Dickensheets, “The Topical Vocabulary of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Musicological Research 31, no. 2–3 (April 1, 2012): 102, https://doi.org/10.1 080/01411896.2012.682887. 17 Caplin, “Topics and Formal Functions,” 614. 18 James A. Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata , Acls Humanities so/9780195146400.001.0001, 14-20, especially 17; It is important to note that my discussion largely refers to the thematic parameters of the sonata form and not to the harmonic parameters. I have made this choice to reflect the loosening of tonal norms by the time Walton wrote the viola concerto, and as a result, their limited impact on the narrative of the work. 19 When approached to premiere the work, Lionel Tertis reputedly “couldn’t imagine that a chord containing C and C could possibly sound well.” See William Walton, Concerto for Viola and Orchestra , ed. Christopher Wellington, vol. 12, The William Walton Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), vi. E-Book (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:o

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

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