High Notes
This week at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival
Apiece not to miss at Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival this week is Façade: An Entertainment, which will be given twice, on Sunday, Aug. 5, and Monday, Aug. 6. A curious work from the Roaring Twenties, it qualifies as a period piece, a remnant from a time when Dada — or a form of it that aligned with classic British eccentricism — could still provoke outrage. It was a collaboration between William Walton, then just Willy and not yet Sir William, and Edith Sitwell, then three decades away from becoming Dame Edith. She was the eldest of the three Sitwell siblings, the progeny of a baron noted for his peculiarity. She styled herself a poetess, her brother Osbert shared her literary ambitions, and the youngest, Sacheverell (nicknamed Sachi), was an intellectual of omnivorous interests, particularly informed in the history of art and music. All of them were uncensored in their creative aspirations and, on the whole, odd.
Walton (1902-1983) would later earn respect for his First Symphony, his three concertos (for violin, viola, and cello), some film scores (particularly for the Olivier-directed Henry V), his oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast, and his evergreen Crown Imperial coronation march, but in 1920 a brilliant musical future seemed unlikely. He had been pursuing a bachelor’s degree at Oxford, where he became friendly with the Sitwells. But, as he explained in a documentary filmed when he was seventy-nine: “In fact, I eventually left Oxford because I was sent down. I just couldn’t pass those damned exams. But the question was, Where was I going to be sent down to? … So I said to Sachi, What the hell am I going to do? And he said, Why don’t you come stay with us in London, at least until you can find something more permanent. I stayed with them for almost 15 years. One evening, Edith read aloud some poems she had written as a sort of technical exercise. Osbert said they’d go much better with music. I couldn’t see what kind of music, but I took the poems up to the attic where I lived and started to work on them.”
Their collaboration was ready for an audience by January 1922, when some 20 friends gathered at the Sitwell home for a bizarre performance. An ensemble of four musicians, conducted by Walton, played his short pieces while Edith recited her corresponding poems, her words following precisely notated rhythms. Osbert provided an introduction and announced the numbers. Walton recalled: “They had the idea — you know how embarrassing recitations can be — of putting the whole thing behind a curtain.” In order to be heard, Edith proclaimed her texts through a sort of megaphone, which projected through a hole in the curtain. “They thought I was off my head, she was off her head,” said Walton, “but we persevered and decided to try a public performance at the Aeolian Hall, … this time with six instruments.” (Walton designed the parts for clarinet and bass clarinet to be doubled by a single player, but the Chamber Music Festival will have a separate player for each, yielding an ensemble of seven instruments.)
Recitations were not in themselves unusual in the 19th and early 20th century, neither in Europe nor America. They were a staple of home salons and of public gatherings, largely (but not exclusively) a distaff occupation. As the genre developed it became common for recitations to be delivered against a musical accompaniment. The phenomenon was explored in a fascinating book published last year, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word, by Marian Wilson Kimber (University of Illinois Press). Kimber focuses on how the practice played out in the American arena. It was very prominent on the turn-of-the-century Chautauqua circuit, where the inherent wholesomeness would protect female practitioners from being confused with actual actresses, whose morals might be more suspect. Even as Chautauqua recitations declined in the 1920s (doubtless the rise of radio had much to do with it), some women persisted in writing, publishing, and performing such selections. The genre boasted its own stars, even through midcentury, including Phyllis Fergus, who sometimes referred to her pieces as pianologues, and the diseuse Frieda Peycke, who performed with a group that, among its other bookings, appeared at the “reading rooms” for employees of the Santa Fe Railway. Full ensembles of elocutionists attained some currency, with Wellesley College supporting a student “Verse-Speaking Choir” from 1933 until 1948, when it was discontinued for being insufficiently academic.