Viola Concerto (Walton)

The Viola Concerto by William Walton was written in 1929 for the violist Lionel Tertis at the suggestion of Sir Thomas Beecham. The concerto carries the dedication "To Christabel" (Christabel McLaren, Lady Aberconway). But Tertis rejected the manuscript, and composer and violist Paul Hindemith gave the first performance. The work was greeted with enthusiasm. It brought Walton to the forefront of British classical music. In The Manchester Guardian, Eric Blom wrote, "This young composer is a born genius" and said that it was tempting to call the concerto the best thing in recent music of any nationality. Tertis soon changed his mind and took the work up.

Walton and Hindemith's collaboration on the concerto engendered a close friendship that lasted until the latter's death in 1963. A performance by Tertis at a Three Choirs Festival concert in Worcester in 1932 was the only occasion on which Walton met Elgar, whom he greatly admired. Elgar, however, did not share the general enthusiasm for Walton's concerto.

Superficially, the work follows the standard three-movement format for a concerto. However, the tempo marks hint at some important differences:

Ordinarily, the first and third movements of a concerto are in fast tempi, while the second movement is slow. Here, the first movement is on the slow side, and the second movement is unequivocally fast. In terms of character, the second movement is scherzo-like. Few concerti include a scherzo, but Walton's Viola Concerto seems to have been modeled on Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto, which Walton admired. Prokofiev's concerto also has a scherzo for its second movement as well as a relatively slow-moving first movement.

Walton composed his Viola Concerto at the suggestion of conductor Sir Thomas Beecham for violist Lionel Tertis. Tertis had served as principal violist in Beecham's orchestra. Beecham, however, had not heard any of Walton's music. Walton wrote in December 1928 that he was "working hard" on the piece and in February 1929 that he had finished the second movement. He wrote that he considered the concerto potentially his finest work to date; whether this assessment would hold true, he added, depended on how the third movement turned out. He completed the work by the middle of 1929.

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