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| L-R: JBK, Stewart Craggs, Lionel Friend, Alessandra Vinciguerra, David Lloyd-Jones, Michael Burden |
My introduction for the catalogue was a bit of a gushing tribute. OUP truncated it a bit, so I thought I would post the unedited version here in tribute to Stewart. It says what I wanted it to the first time, although it is wholly inadequate to honor him as he deserved. I send my condolences to his family.
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INTRODUCTION
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| The cover of the paperback issue. |
The individual that takes this volume down from the shelf is
very likely in search of answers; indeed, facts it contains in abundance. But the labour that produced it was one
dedicated to hunting out facts even when they seemed contradictory, or when the
pattern they produced seemed at odds with received wisdom. The result is, to be sure, a nuanced account
of the documents surrounding William Walton—documents which amass together to
reveal much of the life and works of the man.
Motivating all of the archival research, though, is an abiding passion
for the music itself. Stewart Craggs can
recall a fascination beginning already in his childhood beside the radio, ‘when
the strength and majesty of the first symphony created an impression that has
never faded’.
Dr. Craggs is not Dr. Johnson’s ‘harmless drudge,’ who
remains ‘doomed to only to remove the rubbish and clear obstructions from
the paths of Learning and Genius’.
Rather, Craggs’s work has been
devoted to discovering a complex Walton lying behind a number of façades—and
the real figure seems to attract more attention from performers and scholars
year by year, even as the nuances are revealed.
Craggs’s enthusiasm for even the minutiae of his subject is couched in a
very congenial style, yielding a reference work of a sort the late Christopher
Palmer classified even as ‘reading-in-bed material’. Indeed, much else of what Palmer wrote in his
introduction for the second edition of this catalogue (1990) still holds. The compiler’s ‘untiring industry’ has not
abated, and the rich harvest of information continues, so much so that it seems
a pity that it has to be arrested so that it can be manifested on the pages of
this volume. Naturally the work goes on,
and this third edition represents only a certain state of his Walton research,
now in its fifth decade.
Craggs’s formal research on Walton began in the late 1960s
when he selected the composer as the topic for a thesis to be submitted in
application to become a Fellow of the Library Association (now the Chartered
Institute of Library and Information Professionals). At first Craggs conceived of the work to be
mainly a bibliography and discography; as his spadework uncovered a body of
material that had been completely forgotten (for example, the incidental music
for The Son of Heaven, The Boy David, and Macbeth), his supervisor, Alec
Hyatt-King, advocated that the thesis include a work catalogue as well. The thesis was successfully submitted in
1973. Alan Frank, head of music at
Oxford University Press and thus a key contact during the gestation of the
thesis, proposed publishing Craggs’s research as a complete thematic catalogue. This appeared in 1977, and it was perhaps the
most tangible and significant of the many seventy-fifth birthday tributes to
the composer. The extended prefatory ‘critical
appreciation’ by Michael Kennedy formed the nucleus of the authorised biography
that was to appear only in 1989. Kennedy
had deferred writing his full-length biography until after the death of his
subject; the publication of the catalogue before the composer’s death made a
second edition a foregone conclusion, even with the decline in Walton’s
compositional output in his last years.
Hardly had the 1977 catalogue emerged from the presses
before Craggs embarked on further Walton research for a Master of Arts at the
University of Strathclyde. His
three-volume thesis “William Turner Walton:
his life and music” was completed in 1978 under the supervision of the
eminent bibliographer William R. Aitken.
In the preface, Craggs remarks:
“There has been so far no entirely satisfactory and detailed biographical account of Walton. Those that have been published all seem to have been based upon factual information communicated by Walton to H J Foss in 1932, to which nothing much has been added over the years. In my research I have tried to discover the true facts rather than those purported to be true. To do this, I have approached many individuals involved in Walton’s career. Thus I have been able to begin correcting prior misapprehensions and have filled in much missing detail of considerable musicological interest....”
Walton himself was only partially helpful, in that he tended
to favour the briefest possible reply to any query. He was wary of the painstaking efforts of
‘Scraggs’ to verify every detail, to supplant a simple explanation with a more
complicated truth, and to exhume what lay buried under a carefully constructed
persona. The ‘Grand Old Man’ image had
been codified by the press and the BBC in the 1972 and 1977 birthday
celebrations, and it was one Walton was happy to adopt as the story he wished
to be told. Although Walton himself had
maintained an arm’s-length relationship with his chronicler, his widow
recognised that Craggs knew the music and the documents more intimately than
anyone had known the man himself. At her
suggestion, Craggs was given the task of examining the voluminous archive of
Walton correspondence held by Oxford University Press; this yielded substantial
new factual data for many works, and the more complete documentation is clearly
evident in the 1990 second edition of the catalogue. Craggs himself purchased a collection of
letters from the young composer to Siegfried Sassoon, subsequently acquired by
Walton and now a part of his archive at Ischia.
Moreover, if the composer himself was sometimes obfuscatory, many of
Walton’s contemporaries with whom Craggs corresponded were more forthcoming. Craggs’s archive of these letters from the
Great and the Good is impressive to behold, and the 1990 edition is enriched by
these recollections. (Palmer’s
‘reading-in-bed material’ description highlights the remarkable amount of
supplementary ‘titbits’ that fill-out the chronology and the source
descriptions.) The second edition was
awarded the Library Association’s 1990 McColvin Medal for the outstanding
reference book of that year.
As before, the publication of the catalogue left Craggs’s energies for Walton research unabated, producing two further books even as he
simultaneously produced substantial reference works encompassing a very wide
scope of related figures: William Alwyn
(1985), Malcolm Arnold (1998), Richard Rodney Bennett (1990), Lennox Berkeley
(2000), Arthur Bliss (1988 (based on his PhD dissertation), 1996, 2002),
Benjamin Britten (2002), Alan Bush (2007), Peter Maxwell Davies (2002), Edward
Elgar (1995), Alun Hoddinott (1993), John Ireland (1993, 2007), William Mathias
(1995), and John McCabe (1991), as well as a dictionary of film composers
(1998)—all the while also fulfilling his professional responsibilities as a
librarian and a magistrate. In 1993
Craggs was appointed Professor of Music Bibliography at the University of
Sunderland, producing in the same year William Walton: A Source Book, which offered comprehensive
documentation of the extant manuscripts, first editions, letters, and
recordings. In 1999 he edited a
collection of essays, William Walton:
Music and Literature, that has acted as a catalyst for much later work.
Internal OUP documents indicate that already in soon after
Walton’s death there was some thought given to reissuing all of their Walton
publications in a uniformly bound edition.
This project was not ultimately realised; perhaps this was just as well,
as there were no plans for a thorough critical examination of each work. It would have been little more than a vanity
edition, in tribute to a figure who had been a house composer since the very
first days of the OUP Music Department.
When the subject was revisited in 1994, it was decided that a credible
new edition would require more than photographic reproductions of the already
published text. A critical edition of
Walton’s works would be an expensive undertaking, and required careful planning. With the appointment of David Lloyd-Jones as
General Editor of the William Walton Edition in 1995, Craggs was appointed
Consultant, and he has given considerable assistance to several volume editors,
as well as contributing a Preface that eloquently navigates the complex web of
material witnesses to the Facade Entertainments (Volume 7). Only 23 volumes were envisaged for the new
edition. This final volume—a third
edition of the Craggs catalogue—was subsequently recognized as essential and
serves as a fitting culmination to the entire project, drawing as it does upon
the considerable research efforts that went into the William Walton Edition in
nearly two decades of fruition.
It may seem remarkable
that barely three decades since his death Walton would have received already a
third edition of a work catalogue when many of his contemporaries await a catalogue
at all. Many factors bear upon this. With just 106 catalogue numbers, Walton’s oeuvre
is not unmanageable (particularly because of his habit of destroying or
otherwise obliterating unsatisfactory efforts), even if each work brings its
own specific set of bibliographical and philological problems—for example, the Fantasia
Concertante (C14), which seems all but apocryphal, and yet receives Craggs’s
full attention, together with the survey of works Walton considered but did not
begin. With the sole exception of the piano
quartet, all of the published works were issued by a single publisher, making
the production files of the OUP Music Department a particularly vital primary
source. More significantly, the bulk of Walton’s
Nachlass is generally well-preserved and available to be consulted in a handful
of locations (with the autographs principally in the Koch collection at Yale’s
Beinecke Library, large portions of the correspondence in the Harry Ransom
Center at the University of Texas, the files of the BBC and the substantial
collection of the Walton Museum in Ischia, in addition to the OUP holdings). This notwithstanding, the task facing anyone
attempting to verify every possible detail is herculean; at least Craggs got an
early start. The reader of this
catalogue can be assured that ‘Holograph:
whereabouts unknown’ is not an idle phrase of an armchair bibliographer,
but is a testimony of decades of indomitable search. Thus
the disappearance of the autograph full score of Belshazzar’s Feast is
astounding. That such a vital source for
a work recognised so early to be a twentieth-century masterpiece could
disappear without trace beggars belief, especially when at least a portion of
the manuscript was extant and loaned out to exhibitions in the 1950s. But there is hope. “Tribute to the Red Cross” (1944), a
manuscript collection containing contributions of men and women distinguished
in politics, literature, art, and music (including Walton, Bliss, Vaughan
Williams, Bax, Ireland, Lambert, and Moeran) was auctioned at Sotheby’s in
1944, and lost from sight for almost seven decades, only to be tracked down by
Craggs only as this volume was being finished.
The foundation he has laid will enable others to continue these pursuits
in coming years.
Stewart Craggs has devoted a lifetime of tireless labour to clarifying the facts of the music of Walton and his contemporaries. Walton himself warily suggested that Craggs’s ‘sleuth capabilities’ might be turned in some other direction, but appreciation for his work is evident time and again in the front matter of very many publications bearing on this material. Michael Kennedy’s remark in 1993 that ‘present and future music historians will have every reason to bless the name of Stewart Craggs’ is a prophecy already fulfilled. Moreover, his caginess notwithstanding, Walton’s own appreciation is manifest in an avuncular gesture: one of his last compositions was the Duettino for Oboe and Violin (C101) for Barnaby and Cordelia Craggs, published here for the first time. Craggs himself views all of his efforts as a lifetime labour of love: ‘to study Walton’s music has been a rewarding experience; to submit to its impact, unforgettable’.
