William Walton: Christmas Carol ‘What Cheer!’

Many choristers will have been introduced to William Walton’s ‘What Cheer!’ through the first volume of Carols for Choirs edited by Reginald Jacques and David Willcocks. This book (and its successors) was to revolutionise the singing of Christmas Carols in ‘choirs and places where they sing’.

Walton wrote four carols over a 45 year period. The first, in 1931, was ‘Make we Joy Now in this Feast’ which was commissioned by the Manchester-based newspaper the Daily Despatch.  It was published there on Christmas Eve. The second carol was ‘What Cheer!’ In 1970 ‘All this Time’ appeared in Carols for Choirs 2 to be followed in 1977 by ‘King Herod and the Cock’ in the succeeding volume.

William Walton was commissioned to write his idiomatic Christmas carol ‘What Cheer!’ in November 1960 as a contribution to the first volume of Carols for Choirs.  It was composed shortly after the first performance of his Second Symphony in Edinburgh on 2 September 1960. Other works dating from 1961 the revision of the Viola Concerto (performed January 1962) and the impressive but underrated ‘Gloria’ for the Huddersfield Choral Society which was first heard on 24 November.

It is not known where or when the premiere of Walton’s carol ‘What Cheer!’ was performed, however Stewart R. Craggs has noted 26 April 1961 as the date of completion.

It was published separately by Oxford University Press in 1962.

The words of the carol are taken from the London grocer, Richard Hill’s (born before 1490) Commonplace Book with some alterations to the text. The holograph of Hill’s book is in the possession of Baliol College, Oxford (MS 534) and has been digitalised.

What cheer? Good cheer!

Be merry and glad this good New Year!

Lift up your hearts and be glad

In Christ’s birth, the angel bade,

Say each to other, if any be sad:

What cheer?

Now the King of heaven his birth hath take,

Joy and mirth we ought to make;

Say each to other, for his sake:

What cheer?

I tell you all with heart so free:

Right welcome, welcome, ye be to me;

Be glad and merry, for charity!

What cheer? Good cheer!

Be merry and glad this good New Year!

  

The carol is for unaccompanied four-part choir (SATB). Carols for Choirsdoes not include a ‘practice accompaniment’ so it is essential for singers to make the correct intonation from an early stage of preparation.

The carol is composed in a bouncy 3/8 metre throughout: the music is signed ‘allegretto’ but this piece could be sung ‘jubiloso’?

‘What Cheer!’ is infused with Walton’s ‘jazz-flavoured rhythm’ without descending to a Rutter-esque ‘pop’ sound. There is a dance music mood to this piece that, in spite of its brevity leaves an impression of profuse rhythmic vitality.  The carol is set in A major, however, allowing for ‘piquant’ dissonances there are relatively few accidentals. There is a modulation into ‘C major’ in the final exclamations of ‘Be merry and glad’, nevertheless the work ends on a solid A major tonic chord. The harmony is not overly dissonant. Considerable use is made of parallel ‘thirds’ between male and female voices.  Much of the striking effect of this carol is made by contrasting loud and quiet ‘What Cheer[s]! between voices.

Frank Howes in his study of Walton’s music (1974) says precious little about this carol. He simply notes that the melody is ‘harmonized by mild progressive dissonance that would not have been written by Stanford nor yet by a serialist composer.’

There are currently 14 versions of ‘What Cheer!’ listed in the Arkiv CD catalogue. One suspects that there be will a few more that have been deleted or are available as digital downloads. Well-known choirs that have recorded this work include the Bach Choir, Queen’s College Cambridge, Polyphony and Christ Church Cathedral Choir. The earliest commercial recording was ‘Sir Cristemas’ by the Elizabethan Singers with Louis Halsey in 1965 on ARGO RG446 (mono) and ZRG 5446 (stereo). A cassette was issued in April 1989 (MCFC164). It has been released on CD and is available in limited supply on Amazon. 

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William Walton: Constant Lambert writing on ‘Facade’

Constant Lambert first appeared as a reciter in Facade in the New Chenil Galleries, Chelsea, London on 29 June 1926 and had an involvement with the work over the succeeding years. In the February 1928 edition of The Dominant magazine he wrote an article entitled ‘Some Recent Works by William Walton.’

The music of the entertainment Facade includes, in its different versions, [1] work ranging over several years, although the only published numbers are of recent date. For the benefit of those who have not heard Facade it may be explained that the entertainment consists of a series of poems by Miss Edith Sitwell, spoken through a megaphone to the accompaniment of six instruments, namely, flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, 'cello and percussion. Both orchestra and reciter are concealed by a screen decorated with a large mask, through the mouth of which the megaphone protrudes.

The poems are recited, for the most part, ‘senza espressione’, but with the utmost precision and variety of rhythm.

The collaboration is most successful and one can think of no other composer who could so well supply the musical equivalent of what has been admirably described as 'the hallucinated vision, the glassily clear technique, the curiously profound wit' of Edith Sitwell's poems. In the early version of Facade the music did little save add a background of strange arabesques and unexpected timbres to the poems; in the later versions, the music is much more clearly formed and there is a greater wealth of thematic material.

The orchestral suite [2], though a very enjoyable work, represents only one side of Facade for the composer has chosen the more brilliant and satirical numbers for adaptation and one may search in vain for the pastoral charm of ‘Daphne’ or the sinister atmosphere of ‘Four in the Morning'. The composer has kept closely- and in my opinion, too closely - to the form and rhythm of the poems. He has not always realized that certain passages have but little meaning when divorced from their peculiar method of presentation; thus, in the fourth number we are given nothing save a rather perfunctory crescendo passage to take the place of the brilliant cadenza for voice which (in the entertainment) leads from the tango to the paso-doble.

The only piece in which he has departed from the original form of the poem is the ‘Tarantella-Sevillana’, perhaps the most successful number in the suite, where the original material has been considerably expanded into a brilliant burlesque of the ‘Mediterranean’ style. [...]

The Dominant February 1928 (with minor edits)

Notes

[1] The study of the versions and recensions of Facade is complex. Suffice to say that most of the pieces of the original series were composed between 1922 and 1929. The first private performance was given at the Sitwell home at 2 Carlyle Square, London on Sunday 24 January 1922. Edith Sitwell was the reciter and William Walton conducted the ensemble of musicians. The first public performance was given at the Aeolian Hall, London, on 12 June 1923. Lambert would have been aware of the original Walton music and also some revisions.

[2] Lambert, at the time of writing this article, would also have known the 1926 Orchestral Suite which included Polka, Valse, Swiss Jodelling Song, Tango-Pasodoble and the Tarantella-Sevillana. This was first heard at the Lyceum theatre on Friday 3 December 1926.

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William Walton: Two Early Songs

The earliest work that has been recorded in the Walton canon is the beautiful Litany for four-part choir dating from December 1915 when the composer was only 14 years old. There is virtually nothing else in the CD catalogues until the underrated, but highly charged and deliciously romantic Piano Quartet composed in 1921 and duly revised some 50 years later.

Whilst Walton was at Oxford he wrote a considerable number of songs, motets and vocal works. Many of these were subsequently discarded. These include the part-song ‘Tell me where is fancy bred’, the early Swinburne setting of ‘Love laid his sleepless head’ and a cantata based on Matthew Arnold’s The Forsaken Merman.
However, I recently discovered two early songs on the Chandos label. To be fair, they have been available since 1994, and they have been in my collection since then: but somehow I have never got round to listening to them. Both are youthful works and have little in them that suggests Walton's later development as an enfant terrible or an establishment composer who was a de facto Master of the Kings Musick!
The first song, dating from 1918, is a setting of Algernon Swinburne's (1837–1909) poem 'The Winds'. This was the first work that William Walton had published. Certainly it is a romantic, almost overblown song that progress with great gusto with a good musical impression of the breeze in the accompaniment. However the strange conclusion of this work with the sudden break in the piano part has been deemed to let this song down.

The second song, 'Tritons' was composed in 1920 and takes a text by the Scottish poet William Drummond (1585–1649)

This is a really impressive song that, as the Chandos liner notes suggest, has ‘vestiges’ of modernism about it. Certainly it has been criticised by Kenneth Avery for having an ambiguous key structure and a monotonous three note phrase dominating the accompaniment. Yet there is something attractive and satisfying about it that makes it a valued addition to William Walton’s early works. Both songs are available on Chandos 9292.

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