William Walton composed his Symphony No. 2 between 1957 and 1960. It was commissioned in November 1955 by the Liverpool Philharmonic Society and was originally intended to commemorate in 1957 the 750th anniversary of the city of Liverpool's royal charter of 1207. Walton, although a diligent worker, did not habitually compose quickly. In addition, existing commissions and other challenges further delayed the completion of the symphony. He finished the first movement in 1959, then the last two in 1960; that same year, he revised the first into its final form. By the time the symphony was completed, the occasion for which it was composed had passed. The city of Liverpool agreed to cede the location of the world premiere to the Edinburgh Festival, with the proviso that it be played by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Conducted by John Pritchard, they performed the world premiere at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, on 2 September 1960.
Walton perceived the initial critical reaction to his Second Symphony as a disaster. Twenty-five years had passed since he had composed his First Symphony. Expectations among British critics that the Second Symphony would surpass its predecessor were high. Instead, they were largely disappointed by the work's lighter mood and conservative idiom. Neville Cardus accused the composer of synthesising compositional tropes that he had previously employed. Peter Heyworth praised Walton's aesthetic convictions but criticised the composer for failing to develop and for stereotyping his own style.
The symphony met with a more favourable response in the United States. George Szell, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, had championed Walton's music since the 1930s. On 29 December 1960 he conducted the American premiere of the Second Symphony at Severance Hall in Cleveland, Ohio. Early in 1961 the Cleveland Orchestra recorded for Epic Records what Szell hoped to be the definitive recording of the symphony. He later said that its success was crucial in goading British critics to re-examine the work. "[Walton] had felt that Edinburgh had almost killed his new work", the composer's wife wrote, "and now Szell had caused it to be reborn".Walton, p. 157 On Szell's death in 1970, Walton rededicated his Second Symphony to the conductor's memory as a gesture of gratitude.
Background Rise and stall Early in his career critical consensus was that William Walton appeared to be on the cusp of a breakthrough as a modernist composer, shown by a series of compositions whose stylistic trajectory culminated with the first three movements of his First Symphony.Harper-Scott, p. 154 During that period, his friend and colleague Constant Lambert ranked him as one of "the most vital minds of the present generation".Harper-Scott, p. 225 When the First Symphony was finally completed and premiered, it met with widespread admiration. It also stoked expectations that it would be the first of a cycle of symphonies by Walton.Matthew-Walker, p. 29
After the First Symphony Walton's modernist career stalled. Instead, he turned to a more conservative idiom.Harper-Scott, pp. 154–155 By the mid-1930s he was seen not as a modernist but as the successor to Elgar in the broad English musical tradition.Kennedy, p. 92 and Tierney, p. 81 According to the musicologist J. P. E. Harper-Scott:Harper-Scott, p. 155
The First remained Walton's only symphony for the next twenty-five years. He composed other orchestral works during this period, but none demonstrated the technical and expressive scope of the First Symphony.Howes, p. 40 The editor of the 2006 and 2012 critical edition of Walton's score, David Russell Hulme, comments that the composer was "reluctant and perhaps temperamentally disinclined to travel the same road twice" and rarely chose to compose more than one major concert or stage work in any genre. Russell Hulme adds that it is therefore unsurprising that the second of Walton's two symphonies "was a long time appearing and that, when it did appear, it should prove to be a very different work from its predecessor".
Commission and composition In 1953 Alan Frank, Walton's publisher at the Oxford University Press, suggested to Ian Hunter, artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival, that the festival might commission a new symphony from Walton to be premiered at the 1956 festival. Both Hunter and Walton greeted the idea with enthusiasm, but Walton was fully occupied with the demanding preparations for the Covent Garden premiere of his opera Troilus and Cressida, fixed for December 1954, and the plan came to nothing. A more concrete proposal was put forward in 1955 by the Liverpool Philharmonic Society for a symphony to be premiered in 1957 to commemorate the 750th anniversary of Liverpool's city charter.Kennedy, p. 196; and Giroud, p. 43 Walton had other commissions to complete, including the Partita for Orchestra, music for a television series based on Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and Anon in Love (a song cycle for Peter Pears and Julian Bream).Meikle, p. 85; and Kennedy, p. 210 Progress was impeded by the composer's recovery from a bad car crash in the first part of 1957. A tentative premiere date of 28 December 1958 was cancelled when Walton could not produce a finished score in time.Burton and Murray, p. 127Tierney, p. 142
Although a diligent worker, Walton composed music slowly.Kennedy, p. 205 In a 1961 interview with the musicologist Eric Salzman for The New York Times, Walton said that the atmosphere of his home on the Italian island of Ischia did not encourage hard work. "One is inclined to ", he said. "I know that's degenerate, but it's quite nice really".Salzman, p. X11 Moreover, Walton had exhausted the potential for ideas that he had formerly extracted from Sibelius and Prokofiev, whose music was no longer in accord with the prevailing musical aesthetic ideals of the mid-1950s.Matthew-Walker, p. 30 He also faced formidable difficulties not only in composing a symphony during a period when the future of the genre was increasingly viewed with doubt, but composing one that would be regarded as a worthy successor to the First Symphony. In reference to the challenges he faced in the creation of the earlier work, Walton joked that this time he would complete the finale first and have it performed alone.Lloyd, p. 232
Walton wrote to Frank on 28 November 1957 that "glimmerings of the [Second Symphony] [were] beginning to stir slightly". Throughout that year and 1958, Walton worked on sketching the Second Symphony.Kennedy, p. 209 He was able to devote himself to the completion of the symphony starting in 1959. In January of that year he completed a draft of the first movement.Giroud, pp. 43–44 That April, he showed it to his fellow composer Hans Werner Henze, who approved of the results. The second movement was completed in February 1960, followed by the finale on 22 July.Kennedy, p. 211 He also revised the first movement earlier in the same year.
By the time the Second Symphony was completed, the occasion it had been intended to commemorate had passed. The city of Liverpool agreed to cede the location of the work's premiere to the 1960 Edinburgh Festival, with the proviso that it be played there by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the score's original dedicatees.
Music Instrumentation Walton's Second Symphony is scored for the following instruments:
Woodwinds 3 Flutes (3rd doubling piccolo) 3 Oboes (3rd doubling cor anglais) 3 Clarinets (2nd doubling clarinet in E-flat, 3rd doubling bass clarinet) 3 Bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon)
Brass 4 French horns 3 Trumpets 3 Trombones Tuba
Percussion (four players) Timpani Military drum Tenor drum Cymbals (crash and suspended) Bass drum Glockenspiel Xylophone Vibraphone Tambourine Bell in D
Keyboards Piano Celesta
Strings 2 Harps 1st Violins 2nd Violins Violas Cellos Double Basses
Timing A typical performance lasts approximately 28 minutes. See table, below.
Publication and manuscript The score was published in 1960 by the Oxford University Press (OUP). In 2006 the OUP issued a new critical edition, edited by Russell Hulme, as part of the OUP's Walton Edition, and republished as a single-volume study score in 2012."William Walton edition 10, Symphony no. 2 ed. by David Russell Hulme", WorldCat The manuscript is held in the Frederick R. Koch Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in Yale University."Compositions: Symphony No. 2, for orchestra (1957–1960)", The William Walton Trust, 2017. Retrieved 11 February 2025
Structure The symphony consists of three similarly-proportioned movementsMatthew-Walker, p. 31 that unfold in linear fashion.Howes, p. 45 As a whole, according to the musicologist Robert Matthew-Walker, it amalgamates influences from the Second Viennese School. In spite of employing a larger orchestra than its predecessor, the Second Symphony's general mood is lighter.Tierney, p. 185 Walton's biographer Neil Tierney has likened the symphony to a large-scale divertimento,Tierney, p. 185 an opinion echoed by the music critic Michael Kennedy, in whose view it would have been more appropriate to have labelled the work a "sinfonietta".
I. Allegro molto The opening movement in sonata form, marked "Allegro molto", begins in ; it is mainly derived from the leap of a major seventh. Its opening augmented eleventh alludes to the same chord at the start of Alban Berg's Violin Concerto, while the initial theme – accompanied by strings and celesta in G minor – evokes parallels with material from Walton's Violin Concerto and his opera Troilus and Cressida. Unlike its equivalent in the First Symphony, the Second's opening movement eschews the use of pedal points entirely. The result, Matthew-Walker wrote, is that "the music's sense of flight, in the vivid Mediterranean-like chiaroscuro colouring and in the virtuosic scoring for woodwind and high strings, seems to defy musical gravity".
A bridge passage for violins and violas segues into the tonally ambiguous second subject, which is orchestrated in the style of ; its melody is confined to six notes – B-A-F-G-E-D – which, the composer and critic Francis Routh has commented, are the first six notes of the passacaglia to come in the finale, thereby establishing "a thematic continuity".Routh, pp. 35–36 The second subject provides a brief respite before the movement resumes its agitated pace. The critic Frank Howes describes the next section as "noisy with glissandi, percussion, brass, and short snaps and stutters on the strings".Howes, pp. 45–46 A development section leads to a recapitulation in which the first subject is compressed to the half the length of its original form and the second subject is extended to be slightly longer than at its first appearance. A solo horn announces the coda; the opening motif is repeated and the movement concludes softly in G minor.Howes, pp. 46–47
The critic Bayan Northcott writes that cumulatively "the trapping of [the first movement's] gestural fun and games in a singularly constricted and dissonant harmonic field produces as unsettling an effect as anything in Walton".Northcott, p. 183
II. Lento assai The second movement is in and its tempo is designated "Lento assai". Tierney describes it as appearing to be "an almost continuous, unbroken web of sumptuous cantilena writing". Each idea is developed from its predecessor organically. Howes describes the movement as "brimming with ideas of great immediate beauty" and suggests that it could function on its own as a symphonic poem. He further compared the climax to an operatic scene.Howes, p. 47 This gives way to a passage of ascending and descending figures on woodwinds, celesta, harps, and strings framing a solo horn. The movement ends in harmonic uncertainty between B major and B minor.Tierney, p. 186
III. Passacaglia: Theme. Risoluto – Variations – Fugato – Coda. Scherzando