William Walton (1902-83) Christmas Carol: All this Time: Part 1

William Walton’s lovely Christmas carol ‘All this Time’ was written relatively late in his career in 1970. The previous year had witnessed the premiere of the film The Battle of Britain which included music by Walton and Ron Goodwin, although subject to some considerable dissension.  On 14 January 1970 his Improvisations on an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten was heard in San Francisco at the War Memorial Opera House performed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Josef Krips.  This work was a commission from the bio-chemist Dr Ralph Dorfman (1911-85) in memory of his first wife, Adeline Smith Dorman. The British premiere was at The Maltings, Snape on 27 June where Sir Charles Groves conducted the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.  The year also saw music composed for the film of the Chekov play Three Sisters, now forgotten, except for the three movement suite arranged by Christopher Palmer on Chandos (CHAN 8870).  One other brief work composed in 1970 was the Theme (for variations) for cello solo: this was part of a joint work, Music for a Prince dedicated to Charles, Prince of Wales in celebration of his Investiture in Caernarvon the previous year. This collection, which included contributions by Lennox Berkeley, Arthur Bliss, Ronald Binge, Vivian Ellis, John Gardner, Joseph Horovitz, Mitch Murray, Steve Race, Ernest Tomlinson, Guy Warrack, Brian Willey, Grace Williams and David Wynne, appears to have sunk without trace. However, the Theme has been resurrected and included on Tony Woollard’s debut CD Cello Journey. (WWRCJ1)

‘All this time’ is one of the few pieces that Walton wrote for unaccompanied mixed choir. John Coggrave (Craggs, 1999) has noted there are some 15 settings of religious texts (not including Belshazzar’s Feast) made between 1916 and 1977. These fall into three groups:

1. Settings of medieval carol texts.

2. Full-scale setting of liturgical texts.

3. Treatments of poetic or biblical material.

There are four carols, (Group 1) written between 1931 and 1970 – ‘Make we Joy now in this Fest’ (1931), ‘What Cheer?’ (1961), ‘All this Time’ (1970) and ‘King Herod and the Cock’ (1977).  Coggrave suggests that these are ‘delightful examples of medieval pastiche, as invigorating and accomplished as Walton’s neo-Elizabethan pastiche in his Shakespearean film scores.’  Neil Tierney (1984) considers that the vocal scoring of ‘All this Time’ has a ‘simplicity’ that ‘matches that of the words.’  The first of these carols owes something to Peter Warlock’s examples of the genre without making use of chromatic harmonies in succeeding verses. (Meurig Bowen, Hyperion sleeve notes, CDA67330, 2002). ‘What Cheer?’ and ‘All this Time’ are vibrant and ‘full of harmonic bite.’ The final example ‘King Herod and the Cock’ is a gentle example of a Christmas carol with little to trouble or challenge the listener.

In March 1970 Walton was asked by Oxford University Press for a work to be included in the second volume of the popular Carols for Choirs, Volume 1 which had been published in 1961 with conspicuous success. ‘All this time’ was published in Carols for Choirs 2, edited by David Willcocks and John Rutter (1970). It was also issued separately as an Oxford Choral Songs Series, X201. The manuscript is archived at the William Walton Museum in Forio d’Ischia, Italy.

       

The text of ‘All this Time’ is an anonymous 16^th century carol, written before 1536, possibly derived by the composer from Edith Rickert’s Ancient English Christmas Carols, 1400-1700, London 1910, and subsequently reprinted many times. Rickert (1871-1938) was a significant medievalist at the University of Chicago. Her major contributions included collaboration on Chaucer Life-Records and the eight-volume Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940).

There are a few minor verbal differences, and the addition of the refrain ‘All this time this song is best’ at the end of each stanza. The words ‘Verbum caro factum est’ translate to ‘The Word was made flesh.'  I have shown Walton’s changes in italics and Rickert’s original text (assuming he used this edition) in square brackets. Minor punctuation changes have been ignored.

All this time this song is best:

All this time this song is best:

‘Verbum caro factum est.’

This night there is a Child y-born,

That sprang out of Jesse’s thorn;

We must sing and say thereforn,

All this time this song is best:

‘Verbum caro factum est.’

Jesus is the Childës name

And Mary mild is His dame,

All our sorrow [is] shall turn[ed] to game:

All this time this song is best:

‘Verbum caro factum est.’

It fell upon [the] high midnight,

The starres [they] shone both fair and bright,

The angels sang with all their might:

All this time this song is best:

‘Verbum caro factum est.’

Now kneel we down [up]on our knee,

And pray we to the Trinity,

Our help, our succour for to be.

All this time this song is best:

‘Verbum caro factum est.’