William Walton wrote "Belshazzar's Feast," which Klaus Mäkelä calls one of his “absolute favorite” pieces, a “great party.”
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Regarded as one of England’s most important composers, along with Edward Elgar and Benjamin Britten, William Walton (1902-1983) has remained a fixture on the concert stage.
One barometer of Walton’s standing is his Belshazzar’s Feast, a oratorio that debuted in 1931 at the Leeds Triennial Festival in England. By the 1970s, however, the work had largely fallen out of the repertory. “In the 1960s, Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem obliterated all other English choral music in America,” said Byron Adams, a Los Angeles-based musicologist.
But Belshazzar’s Feast is making a comeback. “I think a younger generation of conductors is looking beyond the usual repertory championed by Leonard Bernstein and other major conductors of his generation," Adams said. What helped in part was the 100th anniversary of Britten’s birth in 2013 and the oversaturation of his work with the worldwide celebration around that milestone. “There has been this sort of odd reaction against Britten, which opened space for other British composers of the past and present,” Adams said.
The latest champion of Belshazzar’s Feast is conductor Klaus Mäkelä, music director designate of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He calls it one of his “absolute favorite” pieces and in a video describes it as being like a “great party.” “It’s a piece you can’t just listen to and not be touched,” Mäkelä said. “It’s a piece you really want to follow like an action film.”
Mäkelä led the work with the Cleveland Orchestra in April 2024, and he will reprise it with the CSO in concerts Oct. 8-9 (also at Symphony Ball on Oct. 10) featuring famed baritone Thomas Hampson as soloist. The concerts will mark the CSO’s first performances of the work since November 1976 when Sir Georg Solti and the ensemble performed it in Orchestra Hall and at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Adams, a retired distinguished professor at University of California, Riverside, who is working on a biography of French composer Francis Poulenc, has long been a scholar and champion of Walton and his music. He wrote the entry on the composer for the revised Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and also contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Elgar (2004).
Belshazzar’s Feast “is a piece you can’t just listen to and not be touched. It’s a work you really want to follow like an action film.” — Klaus Mäkelä
Walton grew up in the Lancashire in northwest England. His father was a church organist and voice teacher, and his mother was a contralto. He sang in his father’s choir and later won a scholarship to the Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford. The youngster’s early attempts at writing music, like his 1916 choral work, A Litany, drew the attention of Thomas Strong, the dean of Christ Church, who helped Walton to become at 16 an undergraduate at Christ Church. There, he fell under the tutelage of organist, conductor and pedagogue Hugh Allen, who introduced him to modern works like Igor Stravinksy’s Petrushka.
At Oxford, Walton also met poet Sacheverell Sitwell Sitwell and his siblings, Osbert and Edith. He wound up living with the three in London more than a decade, and they immersed him in the cultural life of London, where he met musical luminaries such as Igor Stravinsky and George Gershwin; they took him on a life-changing trip to Italy. Walton collaborated with Edith Sitwell on Façade, which consisted of readings of her poetry with musical accompaniment for six instruments that he composed.
Walton’s big breakthrough came in 1929 with his Viola Concerto, for which Paul Hindemith served as soloist at its premiere. “That really put him on the map,” Adams said. Other important works by Walton include his Symphony No. 1 (1934-35) and the British coronation marches, Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre.
After Walton’s success with the Viola Concerto, the BBC commissioned him to write what was originally supposed to be a short choral work for 15 musicians. He settled on the tale of Belshazzar’s Feast, which tells the Old Testament story of the Babylonian captivity of the people of Israel and the death of their oppressor, Belshazzar. By the time it was completed in 1931, it had evolved into a 35-minute work for full orchestra, chorus, baritone soloist and two brass bands.
The text, which was assembled by Osbert Sitwell, draws primarily on the fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel, as well as other Biblical sources, including the Book of Revelation. It has been called both a cantata and oratorio. Adams falls into the latter camp.
Adams regards Belshazzar’s Feast as a revolutionary choral work for its time. To understand why, it’s important to consider the musical history leading up to it. The oratorio form has been popular in England since George Frideric Handel popularized it in the 18th century; nearly all such pieces deal in some way with an Old Testament theme. The form was especially popular during the Victorian era, with doggedly pious but virtually forgotten works like Frederick Ouseley’s The Martyrdom of St. Polycarp (1854). “And most of those oratorios are terribly boring,” Adams said.
But everything changed in 1900 with Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, what Adams calls the first modern British oratorio. It featured a text by John Henry Newman and was written in a Wagnerian style. Other breakthrough choral works followed, including Gustav Holst’s Hymn of Jesus (1917-19) with a text from a Gnostic gospel, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ apocalyptic oratorio Sancta Civitas (1923-1925), a reaction to World War I in which the composer served.
Belshazzar’s Feast proved to be just as daring, especially compared with the staid Victorian works of a few decades earlier. The oratorio opens with these words: “Thus spake Isaiah/Thy sons that thou shalt beget/They shall be taken away And be eunuchs.” The work “eunuchs” is emphatically proclaimed by the chorus with a thunderous burst from the trombones. “You can imagine the shock of that first audience,” Adams said.
Some of the critics of the day were stunned as well. But the work was far from a flop. “The more advanced music critics praised it,” Adams said. “Choral societies, because it was a challenge, took it on. It was short. It was exciting. It was grandiose. But one of the reasons for its popularity is its searing critique of the years before the First World War.”
Walton did not serve in World War I, but Osbert Sitwell, who was stationed in the trenches near Ypres in Belgium and reached the rank of captain, was horrified by the events of WWI.
Adams also believes that Walton, who grew up in an impoverished family with an alcoholic father, strongly identified with the oppressed Jewish people depicted in Belshazzar’s Feast. In one of the most intense moments in the oratorio, the power-drunk king commands his enslaved Jewish servants to bring the sacred vessels from temple in Jerusalem that his father had looted. At that moment, the chorus, almost spitting out the words, sings: “They drank wine again/Yea, drank from the sacred vessels.”
“The horror that is expressed in that moment, the revulsion, the disgust at such profanation is simply heart-rending,” Adams said. But Belshazzar is brought down, and the work ends with a final chorus of liberation. “And the fact that it is influenced by George Gershwin, a Jewish composer, is not incidental,” he said.
In addition to its subject matter, Adams said, the work was also revolutionary because of its “intense chromaticism,” especially in the baritone part, and the “shocking brilliance of the orchestration.” In the climactic moment, after the sacrilege of the vessels, a ghostly hand writes the words of God on the wall in Aramaic, “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” which the libretto translates as: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”
The words are accompanied by a then-unusual burst of percussion and then the chorus screams the word “slain,” in the subsequent stanzas: “In that night was Belshazzar the King slain/And his Kingdom divided.” “That’s still a shocking moment,” Adams said. “You don’t expect that in British choral music.”
Along with Gershwin, Walston’s influences included Elgar, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Ravel, not to mention jazz and popular music, elements that were dismissed by some of his peers. The final chorus, Adams points out, is “terribly jazzy,” and he even sang a few bars to illustrate his point. “For Walton,” he said, “nothing [musical] he could use or liked was unclean, and this is why Belshazzar’s Feast is so fascinating and so provocative.”
In the 1950s and ‘60s, Walton’s reputation began to sag with rise of atonal composers such as Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis and the dominance in British music of Britten and Michael Tippett. It also didn’t help, Adams said, that Walton’s 1954 opera, Troilus and Cressida, never found its way into the standard repertory largely because of its unwieldy libretto. When Walton received England’s Order of the Merit in 1967, he burst into tears and expressed surprise that Queen Elizabeth even remembered who he was.
Now Walton’s music is on the rise again, and Adams hopes that the CSO’s return to Belshazzar’s Feast 50 years after the ensemble last performed it will spark a broader resurgence of the thrilling, still-provocative work.
