SIMON HEFFER HINTERLAND

Agony and heartbreak lie behind one of the 20th century’s greatest symphonies

Ihis Sinfonia Concertante, Viola Concerto and cantata Belshazzar’s Feast, the 32-year-old had been unable to finish the symphony he had promised to the conductor Sir Hamilton Harty – and the premiere was fast approaching.

He had agonised over it. He worked slowly and intensely self-critically. Although there were elements of genius in his work, the creative process did not come naturally to him. Walton’s difficulties with girls may also have played a part. Although when he eventually married, in his mid-40s, it was to someone half his age, he pursued two older women in his 20s and 30s and critics have argued that the turbulence of the First Symphony has much to do with the end of his relationship with Imma von Doernberg, a German baroness to whom the work was eventually dedicated.

Harty persuaded Walton to let him perform the three completed movements of the symphony, which he did with the London Symphony Orchestra on Dec 3 1934. So instead of ending with the spacious, magnificent finale Walton eventually wrote, the symphony concluded with the third movement, an “Andante con malincolia” – a subdued, reflective, almost doubting passage of music. Yet the work was received so well that it was given several other performances in its incomplete state.

When, in November 1935, Harty and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at last performed the whole symphony, it received an ecstatic reception, and swiftly entered the international repertoire.

The work begins quietly, but quickly establishes a relentless momentum that drives it powerfully forward in an idiom then unique in British music. Walton rejected assessments that the first movement in particular echoed Sibelius, though one discerns techniques familiar from Sibelius’s second and fifth symphonies. He creates music astonishingly and unequivocally modern, but without the aggressive dissonances one would associate with the Viennese school.

The musicality, like the powerful drive of the music, is uncompromising. At the end of the first movement, one has the rare sense that a musical idea has been expressed and worked through to its natural conclusion.

The second movement is a scherzo, at times dark to the extent of seeming almost diabolical, yet it shifts constantly from a sense of darkness to light. As in the opening movement, there is a strong feeling of tension from start to finish. The movement is marked “Presto con malizia”, and the darkness we hear is the composer’s representation of a sense of malice.

The melancholy of the third movement is, perhaps, the composer’s sense of regret at having exhibited his dark side in the second; there is a grandeur to its sadness, emphasised by the unremitting stateliness of the tempo.

The finale is worth waiting for: it wraps up with a sense of triumph a work that has expressed tension, darkness, regret and sadness. It opens with something approaching a fanfare and remains brisk, upbeat and expansive throughout: a reflective passage near the end provides a chance for the listener to absorb the vast canvas of impressions that the symphony has offered. Perhaps the triumph is exactly what the composer felt not just in completing his work, but in completing it in a suitably sublime fashion.

There are more than two dozen recordings of the work: and although the most recent, state-of-the-art account by Edward Gardner and the BBC SO on Chandos is impressive, the first of Andre Previn’s two recordings, on RCA with the LSO in 1967 remains awesome, as does Alexander Gibson’s with the Scottish National Orchestra in 1984, also on Chandos. Yet however you hear it, it is one of the greatest symphonies of the 20th century.