Façade is a series of poems by Edith Sitwell

Edith Sitwell

Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE was a British poet and critic.-Background:Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, the oldest child and only daughter of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet, of Renishaw Hall; he was an expert on genealogy and landscaping...

, best known as part of Façade – An Entertainment in which the poems are recited over an instrumental accompaniment by William Walton

William Walton

Sir William Turner Walton OM was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera...

. The poems and the music exist in several versions.

Sitwell began to publish some of the Façade poems in 1918, in the literary magazine Wheels. In 1922 many of them were given an orchestral accompaniment by Walton, Sitwell's protégé. The "entertainment" was first performed in public in 1923, and achieved both fame and notoriety for its unconventional form. Walton arranged two suites of his music for full orchestra. When Frederick Ashton

Frederick Ashton

Sir Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton OM, CH, CBE was a leading international dancer and choreographer. He is most noted as the founder choreographer of The Royal Ballet in London, but also worked as a director and choreographer of opera, film and theatre revues.-Early life:Ashton was born at...

 made a ballet of Façade in 1931, Sitwell did not wish her poems to be part of it, and the orchestral suites were used.

After Sitwell's death, Walton published supplementary versions of Façade for speaker and small ensemble using numbers dropped between the premiere and the publication of the full score in 1951.

Versions

Façade exists in several strongly contrasted versions, principally:

• Edith Sitwell's Façade and Other Poems, 1920–1935 – the published versions of those of the poems chosen by the author for her 1950 volume of collected verse.
• The Sitwell-Walton Façade (1951) – the first, and definitive published version of the full score of the entertainment
• Façade Revived (1977) – a set of eight poems and settings not included in the 1951 version, published by Walton to mark his 75th birthday
• Façade II (1979) – a revised version of Façade Revived, with some numbers dropped and others added
• Façade – the complete version, 1922–1928 – a 42-number CD set compiled and performed by Pamela Hunter (1993) restoring all the poems that Walton set, and nine that he did not set.
• Walton's orchestral Façade Suites (1926 and 1938)

A table detailing the differences between the versions can be seen here.

Sitwell's published Façade poems

It is sometimes said that the Façade verses are nonsense poetry, in the tradition of Edward Lear

Edward Lear

Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, author, and poet, renowned today primarily for his literary nonsense, in poetry and prose, and especially his limericks, a form that he popularised.-Biography:...

. This, however, is incorrect; despite the experiments with sound and rhythm, there is meaning in Sitwell's poems. The literary scholar Jack Lindsay

Jack Lindsay

Robert Leeson Jack Lindsay was an Australian-born writer, who from 1926 lived in the United Kingdom, initially in Essex. He was born in Melbourne, but spent his formative years in Brisbane...

 wrote, "The associations are often glancing and rapid in the extreme, but the total effect comes from a highly organized basis of sense." Other writers have detected personal references in the Façade poems. Christopher Palmer lists many references to Sitwell's unhappy childhood, from the kind Mariner Man (her father's valet who entertained her with sea-faring stories) to the implacable Mrs Behemoth (her mother).

The Façade poems published by Sitwell in her 1950 collection, Façade and other Poems, 1920–1935 are:

• The Drum
• Clowns' Houses
• Said King Pompey
• The Bat
• Lullaby for Jumbo
• Trio for Two Cats and a Trombone
• Madame Mouse trots
• Four in the Morning
• Black Mrs Behemoth
• The Wind's Bastinado
• En Famille

• Country Dance
• Mariner Man
• The Octogenarian
• Bells of Grey Crystal
• When Cold December
• Came the Great Popinjay
• Fox Trot
• Polka
• Mazurka
• Jodelling Song
• Scotch Rhapsody

• Waltz
• Popular Song
• By the Lake
• The Avenue
• Water Party
• The Satyr in the Periwig
• Dark Song
• "I do like to be beside the Seaside"
• Hornpipe
• Something lies beyond the Scene
• When Sir Beelzebub.

The Sitwell-Walton Façade – An Entertainment

The "entertainment" Façade, in which Sitwell's poems are recited over an instrumental accompaniment by Walton, was first given privately in the Sitwell family's London house on 24 January 1922. The first public performance was given at the Aeolian Hall, London, on 12 June 1923. On both occasions, the author recited the verse and the composer conducted the ensemble.

Walton made changes to the instrumentation for the entertainment between its premiere and the publication of the first printed score nearly thirty years later, but in both 1922-23 and 1951 he scored for six players. The published score specifies flute

Flute

The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening...

 (doubling piccolo

Piccolo

The piccolo is a half-size flute, and a member of the woodwind family of musical instruments. The piccolo has the same fingerings as its larger sibling, the standard transverse flute, but the sound it produces is an octave higher than written...

), clarinet

Clarinet

The clarinet is a musical instrument of woodwind type. The name derives from adding the suffix -et to the Italian word clarino , as the first clarinets had a strident tone similar to that of a trumpet. The instrument has an approximately cylindrical bore, and uses a single reed...

 (doubling bass clarinet

Bass clarinet

The bass clarinet is a musical instrument of the clarinet family. Like the more common soprano B clarinet, it is usually pitched in B , but it plays notes an octave below the soprano B clarinet...

), alto saxophone

Alto saxophone

The alto saxophone is a member of the saxophone family of woodwind instruments invented by Belgian instrument designer Adolphe Sax in 1841. It is smaller than the tenor but larger than the soprano, and is the type most used in classical compositions...

, trumpet

Trumpet

The trumpet is the musical instrument with the highest register in the brass family. Trumpets are among the oldest musical instruments, dating back to at least 1500 BCE. They are played by blowing air through closed lips, producing a "buzzing" sound which starts a standing wave vibration in the air...

, percussion, and cello

Cello

The cello is a bowed string instrument with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is a member of the violin family of musical instruments, which also includes the violin, viola, and double bass. Old forms of the instrument in the Baroque era are baryton and viol .A person who plays a cello is...

. Walton quotes a range of earlier composers in his score, from Rossini (the William Tell

William Tell (opera)

Guillaume Tell is an opera in four acts by Gioachino Rossini to a French libretto by Etienne de Jouy and Hippolyte Bis, based on Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell. Based on the legend of William Tell, this opera was Rossini's last, even though the composer lived for nearly forty more years...

 overture appears in the Swiss Jodelling Song) to George Grossmith

George Grossmith

George Grossmith was an English comedian, writer, composer, actor, and singer. His performing career spanned more than four decades...

 (whose comic song, "See me dance the polka", is present throughout Walton's Polka).

In the Sitwell-Walton Façade there are three poems, "Through Gilded Trellises," "A Man from a far Country" (from Sitwell's The Sleeping Beauty), and "Tarantella" (never formally published by Sitwell), that do not feature in her published edition of Façade. As the performing version frequently recited in public and recorded for the gramophone by Sitwell included the Tarantella, it may be assumed that she did not require the musical version to adhere strictly to the text of the published poems.

The public premiere of the entertainment was a succès de scandale. The performance consisted of Sitwell's verses, which she recited through a megaphone protruding through a decorated screen, while Walton conducted an ensemble of six players in his accompanying music. The press was generally condemnatory. One contemporary headline read: "Drivel That They Paid to Hear". The Daily Express loathed the work, but admitted that it was naggingly memorable. The Manchester Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

 wrote of "relentless cacophony". The Observer

The Observer

The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...

 condemned the verses and dismissed Walton's music as "harmless". In The Illustrated London News, Edward J. Dent was much more appreciative: "The audience was at first inclined to treat the whole thing as an absurd joke, but there is always a surprisingly serious element in Miss Sitwell's poetry and Mr Walton's music … which soon induced the audience to listen with breathless attention." In The Sunday Times

The Sunday Times

The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper.The Sunday Times may also refer to:*The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times...

, Ernest Newman

Ernest Newman

Ernest Newman was an English music critic and musicologist. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes him as "the most celebrated British music critic in the first half of the 20th century." His style of criticism, aiming at intellectual objectivity in contrast to the more subjective...

 said of Walton, "as a musical joker he is a jewel of the first water". Among the audience were Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh , known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer...

, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

 and Noël Coward

Noël Coward

Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...

. The last was so outraged by the avant-garde nature of Sitwell's verses and the staging, that he marched out ostentatiously during the performance. The players did not like the work: the clarinettist asked the composer, "Mr Walton, has a clarinet player ever done you an injury?" Nevertheless, the work soon became accepted, and within a decade Walton's music was used for the popular Façade ballet, choreographed by Frederick Ashton

Frederick Ashton

Sir Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton OM, CH, CBE was a leading international dancer and choreographer. He is most noted as the founder choreographer of The Royal Ballet in London, but also worked as a director and choreographer of opera, film and theatre revues.-Early life:Ashton was born at...

.

Walton revised the music continually between its first performance and the first publication of the full score in 1951. That definitive version of the Sitwell-Walton Façade consists of:

• Fanfare (Instrumental)
• Hornpipe
• En Famille
• Mariner Man
• Long Steel Grass (Trio for Two Cats and a Trombone)
• Through Gilded Trellises [from The Sleeping Beauty]
• Tango-Pasodoble (I do like to be beside the Seaside)
• Lullaby for Jumbo
• Black Mrs Behemoth
• Tarantella
• A Man from a far Country [from The Sleeping Beauty]

• By the Lake
• Country Dance
• Polka
• Four in the Morning
• Something lies beyond the Scene
• Waltz
• Swiss Jodelling Song
• Scotch Rhapsody
• Popular Song
• Fox Trot (Old Sir Faulk)
• When Sir Beelzebub.

Walton's later additions

In the 1970s, Walton released some further numbers, under the title Façade Revived, later revising, dropping and adding numbers, as Façade II.

Façade Revived comprises:

• Daphne
• Came the Great Popinjay
• The Last Gallop
• The Octogenarian
• March (Ratatatan)
• The White Owl
• Aubade – Jane, Jane
• Said King Pompey

The work was premiered at the Plaisterers' Hall

Worshipful Company of Plaisterers

The Worshipful Company of Plaisterers is one of the Livery Companies in the City of London. The Plaisterers' Company was incorporated under a Royal Charter in 1501 and whilst the spelling used in the Charter was "Plaisterer", some later Charters used the alternative spelling of "plasterer",...

, London on 25 March 1977, with Richard Baker

Richard Baker (broadcaster)

Richard Baker OBE is a British broadcaster best known as a newsreader for the BBC News from 1954 to 1982. He was a contemporary of Kenneth Kendall and Robert Dougall and was the first person to read the BBC Television News in 1954. At one time he lived in Barnet, North London...

 as reciter and the English Bach Festival Ensemble conducted by Charles Mackerras

Charles Mackerras

Sir Alan Charles Maclaurin Mackerras, AC, CH, CBE was an Australian conductor. He was an authority on the operas of Janáček and Mozart, and the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan...

.

Façade II comprises:

• Came the Great Popinjay
• Aubade – Jane, Jane
• March (Ratatatan)
• Madam Mouse Trots
• The Octogenarian
• Gardener Janus Catches a Naiad
• Water Party
• Said King Pompey

This version was premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival

Aldeburgh Festival

The Aldeburgh Festival is an English arts festival devoted mainly to classical music. It takes place each June in the Aldeburgh area of Suffolk, centred on the main concert hall at Snape Maltings...

 on 19 June 1979, with Peter Pears

Peter Pears

Sir Peter Neville Luard Pears CBE was an English tenor who was knighted in 1978. His career was closely associated with the composer Edward Benjamin Britten....

 as reciter and an ensemble conducted by Steuart Bedford

Steuart Bedford

Steuart John Rudolf Bedford is a British orchestral and opera conductor. He is the brother of composer David Bedford and a grandson of Liza Lehmann....

.

Complete 1922–1928 version

When the most comprehensive edition of the Sitwell-Walton versions was released in 1993 (on a CD featuring the voice of the Façade specialist Pamela Hunter with the Melologos ensemble) the number of poems had risen to 42. Pamela Hunter recites all these poems on the 1993 CD, including the nine (indicated by an asterisk, below) for which there are no extant musical accompaniments.

• Madame Mouse trots
• The Octogenarian
• Aubade – Jane, Jane
• The Wind's Bastinado*
• Said King Pompey
• Lullaby for Jumbo
• Small Talk I
• Small Talk II*
• Rose Castles
• Hornpipe
• Trio for Two Cats and a Trombone (Long Steel Grass)
• When Sir Beelzebub.
• Switchback*
• Bank Holiday I*

• Bank Holiday II*
• Springing Jack*
• En Famille
• Mariner Man
• Came the Great Popinjay
• Ass-Face*
• The Last Gallop
• The White Owl
• Gardener Janus
• Mazurka - God Pluto is a Kindly Man*
• Trams*
• Scotch Rhapsody
• Fox Trot
• Four in the Morning

• Popular Song
• By the Lake
• Black Mrs Behemoth
• Waltz
• Jodelling Song
• Polka
• Daphne
• A Man from a far Country
• Country Dance
• March
• Through Gilded Trellises
• "I do like to be beside the Seaside" (Tango-Pasodoble)
• Tarantella
• Something lies beyond the Scene

Three Songs

Walton set three selections from Façade as art-songs for soprano and piano, to be sung at full voice rather than spoken rhythmically. These are:

• Daphne
• Through Gilded Trellises
• Old Sir Faulk

Façade Suites

The first of Walton's two Façade suites for full orchestra was published in 1926. Walton conducted the first performance. The suite consists of:

• Polka
• Waltz
• Swiss Jodelling Song
• Tango-Pasodoble
• Tarantella Sevillana

The second suite was premiered in 1938, with John Barbirolli

John Barbirolli

Sir John Barbirolli, CH was an English conductor and cellist. Born in London, of Italian and French parentage, he grew up in a family of professional musicians. His father and grandfather were violinists...

 conducting the New York Philharmonic

New York Philharmonic

The New York Philharmonic is a symphony orchestra based in New York City in the United States. It is one of the American orchestras commonly referred to as the "Big Five"...

. It consists of:

• Fanfare
• Scotch Rhapsody
• Country Dance
• Noche Espagnole
• Popular Song
• Old Sir Faulk – Foxtrot

The orchestra for both comprises 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, cor anglais

Cor anglais

The cor anglais , or English horn , is a double-reed woodwind instrument in the oboe family....

, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns

Horn (instrument)

The horn is a brass instrument consisting of about of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. A musician who plays the horn is called a horn player ....

, 2 trumpets, trombone

Trombone

The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. Like all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player’s vibrating lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate...

, tuba

Tuba

The tuba is the largest and lowest-pitched brass instrument. Sound is produced by vibrating or "buzzing" the lips into a large cupped mouthpiece. It is one of the most recent additions to the modern symphony orchestra, first appearing in the mid-19th century, when it largely replaced the...

, timpani

Timpani

Timpani, or kettledrums, are musical instruments in the percussion family. A type of drum, they consist of a skin called a head stretched over a large bowl traditionally made of copper. They are played by striking the head with a specialized drum stick called a timpani stick or timpani mallet...

, 3 percussionists (side drum, cymbals, xylophone

Xylophone

The xylophone is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets...

, tambourine

Tambourine

The tambourine or marine is a musical instrument of the percussion family consisting of a frame, often of wood or plastic, with pairs of small metal jingles, called "zils". Classically the term tambourine denotes an instrument with a drumhead, though some variants may not have a head at all....

, bass drum

Bass drum

Bass drums are percussion instruments that can vary in size and are used in several musical genres. Three major types of bass drums can be distinguished. The type usually seen or heard in orchestral, ensemble or concert band music is the orchestral, or concert bass drum . It is the largest drum of...

, triangle

Triangle (instrument)

The triangle is an idiophone type of musical instrument in the percussion family. It is a bar of metal, usually steel but sometimes other metals like beryllium copper, bent into a triangle shape. The instrument is usually held by a loop of some form of thread or wire at the top curve...

, glockenspiel

Glockenspiel

A glockenspiel is a percussion instrument composed of a set of tuned keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. In this way, it is similar to the xylophone; however, the xylophone's bars are made of wood, while the glockenspiel's are metal plates or tubes, and making it a metallophone...

, castanets, rattle

Rattle (percussion)

A rattle is a percussion instrument. It consists of a hollow body filled with small uniform solid objects, like sand or nuts. Rhythmical shaking of this instrument produces repetitive, rather dry timbre noises. In some kinds of music, a rattle assumes the role of the metronome, as an alternative to...

), and strings.

Façade ballets

Façade was first made into a ballet by Günter Hess for the German Chamber Dance Theatre in 1929. In 1931 Frederick Ashton

Frederick Ashton

Sir Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton OM, CH, CBE was a leading international dancer and choreographer. He is most noted as the founder choreographer of The Royal Ballet in London, but also worked as a director and choreographer of opera, film and theatre revues.-Early life:Ashton was born at...

 created another ballet version. Both used the First Façade Suite. For Ashton's version the Scotch Rhapsody and Popular Song were added to the First Suite. Ashton later expanded the ballet to include the Country Dance, Noche Espagnole and the Foxtrot, Old Sir Faulk.

In 1972, to mark Walton's seventieth birthday, Ashton created a new ballet using the score of the "entertainment". It was premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival, with Peter Pears as the reciter.

Selected discography

Façade – An Entertainment

• Sitwell-Walton version: Edith Sitwell, Peter Pears (reciters), English Opera Group
  English Opera Group
  The English Opera Group was a small company of British musicians formed in 1947 by the composer Benjamin Britten for the purpose of presenting his and other, primarily British, composers' operatic works. The group later expanded in order to present larger-scale works, and was renamed the English...
  
   Ensemble, Anthony Collins
  Anthony Vincent Collins
  Anthony Collins was a British conductor and composer.-Biography:Anthony Vincent Benedictus Collins was born in Hastings, East Sussex in 1893. At the age of seventeen he began to perform as violinist in the Hastings Municipal Orchestra. He then served four years in the army...
  
  . Decca LXT2977 (1954)
• Expanded Sitwell-Walton version: Pamela Hunter (reciter), Melologos Ensemble, Silveer van den Broeck. Discover DICD 920125 (1993)

Façade Suites

• Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Anatole Fistoulari
  Anatole Fistoulari
  Anatole Fistoulari was a noted 20th century conductor.Anatole Fistoulari was born in Kiev Ukraine into a musical family...
  
  . RCA SB2039 (1959)
• Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
  Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
  The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is an English orchestra. Originally based in Bournemouth, the BSO moved its offices to the adjacent town of Poole in 1979....
  
  , Andrew Litton
  Andrew Litton
  Andrew Litton is an American orchestral conductor. Litton is a graduate of The Fieldston School, and holds both undergraduate and Masters degrees in music from Juilliard....
  
  . Decca 470 508-2DC4 (2002)

Three Songs from Façade

• Kiri Te Kanawa
  Kiri Te Kanawa
  Dame Kiri Jeanette Te Kanawa, ONZ, DBE, AC is a New Zealand / Māori soprano who has had a highly successful international opera career since 1968. Acclaimed as one of the most beloved sopranos in both the United States and Britain she possesses a warm full lyric soprano voice, singing a wide array...
  
  , soprano, Richard Amner, accompanist, on the album A Portrait of Kiri Te Kanawa. CBS 74116 (1984)

Others

• Philip Glass
  Philip Glass
  Philip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with...
  
   wrote a piece intended for his Koyaanisqatsi
  Koyaanisqatsi
  Koyaanisqatsi also known as Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, is a 1982 film directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke....
  
   film score, which ultimately wound up instead on Glassworks
  Glassworks
  Glassworks is a chamber music work of six movements by Philip Glass. It is regarded as being a characteristically Glass-like work. Following his larger-scale concert and stage works, Glassworks was Philip Glass's successful attempt to create a more pop-oriented "Walkman-suitable" work, with...
  
   (1982), called "Facade" from Edith Sitwell

External links

• Façade Versions Web page detailing the differences between versions of Façade.
• 'The Jazz Age', lecture and concert by Chamber Domaine
  Chamber Domaine
  Chamber Domaine is a British chamber music ensemble. The ensemble gave its highly praised South Bank and Wigmore Hall debuts in 1999 and since then has performed at leading festivals and concert series in the United Kingdom, Europe and North America....
  
   given on the 6th of November 2007 at Gresham College
  Gresham College
  Gresham College is an institution of higher learning located at Barnard's Inn Hall off Holborn in central London, England. It was founded in 1597 under the will of Sir Thomas Gresham and today it hosts over 140 free public lectures every year within the City of London.-History:Sir Thomas Gresham,...
  
  , including Façade (available for audio and video download).