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Facade is in need of revaluation. If it achieves it, it will have taken nearly 60 years for the proper appraisal to come about; but then this work has throughout its growth demanded long perspectives: a full 30 years, for instance, before the definitive ordering of items was settled and a published score produced; 55 before many of the original items were made known to the public. During this time numerous chroniclers sought to describe and place the extraordinary creation, but nearly all of them found in it little more than charm and precocity, a remarkable upbeat to the composer's serious achievement yet sharply to be distinguished in worth from the Symphony, the Viola Concerto. Some writers went further to disparage Façade, one of them a former editor of this journal:
The desire for laughter in the concert hall is only a naughty whim which will soon pass, for music is not meant to make jokes consciously as in Façade, any more than unconsciously as in Rossini's William Tell Overture. Parody must always be as vulgar as what it parodies … When sanity is reestablished Façade will be recognised as no better Walton than the Musical Joke is good Mozart.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980
References
* The Music of William Walton, OUP, 1964 Google Scholar.
* OUP, 1978.
** The Cocteau-Satie Parade,the succès de scandale of Paris in 1917 Google Scholar, was, with sung words declaimed above the ballet through a hidden megaphone, the important precedent, but not, presumably, a very significant inspirer for the composer.
*** Chatto & Windus, 1976.
* The successive versions of Facade do represent a steady after-polishing of the music. But the original version (composed in a matter of weeks), though unsatisfactory, hard-edged, rather ungrateful, clearly implies all subsequent ones, which retain its heat of involuntary inspiration.
** More strictly, ‘off-settings’. The point is that Sitwell's verbal music is not actually ‘destroyed’ by the addition of music proper; rather the opposite—it is made by it. This is not the case in conventional song, in Britten's many marvellous transformations of poetry, for example, where returning to the text after an initial response to the setting is invariably to go on responding purely to the music.
* Facade and Facade 2, Oxford University Press OUP 201, conducted by Bodford, Steuart Google Scholar.