I’m looking through a small, round hole that may be the most celebrated hole in music history. It’s in the middle of a canvas cloth, forming the open mouthpiece of a roughly painted face. And it’s the hole through which, in 1922, the poet Edith Sitwell thrust a megaphone and entertained a room in Chelsea to the first performance of Façade: her collection of arcane verse written to be rhythmically declaimed against a jazzy score by the composer William Walton.
That the cloth survives – in something like pristine condition – is surprising. But then it’s been hidden away for decades, with people wondering where it was. The hiding place turned out to be a cupboard in the home of film-maker Tony Palmer, who had been lent the cloth by the Sitwell family for a TV documentary about Walton. ‘We used it for an onscreen re-creation of that first Façade,’ Palmer tells me. ‘Then the Sitwells didn’t seem to want it back. So, I hung on to it – carefully wrapped in tissue paper.’
A bizarrely powerful encounter with the past
Now the cloth is back in business, as part of a Sitwell show put together by the group Art Sung and touring around festivals such as Barnes and Buckingham. After this brief outing, it will doubtless end up behind glass in a museum.
Meanwhile, I can testify that peering through that hole, as Edith once did, is a bizarrely powerful encounter with the past. Here was Edith with a handful of musicians squashed behind the not-so-big cloth in a not-so-massive drawing room packed with bemused guests. Was it chaos? Was it deafening? Did it feel significant?
Let's start at the beginning. Façade was a collaboration between three young-ish siblings from an aristocratic family – Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell – and the still younger composer, William Walton, they had adopted as something between a boy-genius and a pet. Sacheverell had met Walton at Oxford, where the latter had been a Christ Church chorister.
The Sitwells saw themselves as heralds of the new
When his voice broke, the young Walton was shoe-horned into undergraduate life at too early an age, leaving without a degree. Not wanting to go home to his modest origins in Oldham, he accepted an invitation to the Sitwells’ London house in Carlyle Square. And Oldham was soon forgotten as he found himself swept into a glittering world.
‘Don’t worry about what to become in life. Become a friend of the Sitwells and wait to see what happens.’
Chelsea’s equivalent to the Bloomsbury Group – with whom they had a mutually suspicious, mostly fractious relationship – the Sitwells saw themselves as heralds of the new in London’s cultural life, dividing opinion between those who admired them and those who mocked. According to the critic FR Leavis, they collectively belonged ‘to the history of publicity rather than of poetry’. But they had social clout. ‘Don’t worry about what to become in life,’ said photographer Cecil Beaton. ‘Become a friend of the Sitwells and wait to see what happens.’
‘I remember thinking it was not a very good idea’
What happened for Walton was the piece that made his name at a tender age – he was 19 at the time of writing it – and supported it ever after. As he would say with only slight exaggeration decades later, ‘It keeps me.’ And reciprocally, he kept working at it for decades, toying with the content, turning it into orchestral suites and ballets, generally keeping the thing alive as a work in progress. By 1942 it settled into a standard version with 21 numbers. But then, as late as 1979, Walton produced a substantial variant, Façade 2, for Peter Pears at the Aldeburgh Festival.
It was a robust outcome for something that, by Walton's own claim, he first threw together and wouldn’t have written at all without the competitive neurosis that was always his spur to creativity. ‘I remember thinking it was not a very good idea,’ he recalled, ‘but when I said so, they told me they’d get Constant [Lambert] to do it if I didn’t – and of course I couldn’t let that occur.’
How the words and music came together isn’t clear: it was a domestic experiment that proceeded haphazardly. And though Edith later claimed that the precocious Walton (15 years her junior) would present her with rhythmic structures and say, ‘See what you can do with that,’ everything seems to have evolved at roughly the same time, with significant input from the Sitwell brothers. The original idea for speaking Edith’s verse alongside music was Sacheverell’s. And it was Osbert who proposed the cloth screen to shroud the participants in a modernist aesthetic of impersonality.
The megaphone was sourced from a man in Hampstead
It was also Osbert who dreamed up the hole, the megaphone (sourced from a man in Hampstead who in fact called it a Sengerphone), and the painted face – for which he recruited the services of the artist Frank Dobson, who had recently been absorbed into the Sitwell circle.
Dobson was principally a sculptor, becoming famous for stylised heads of enigmatically expressionless serenity. In 1921 his bust of Osbert Sitwell, fashioned out of polished brass, created a sensation: TE Lawrence (of Arabia) liked it so much he bought it – subsequently giving it to the Tate Gallery, who then passed it on to the National Portrait Gallery where it still resides.
The head that Dobson painted, loosely, on the canvas for Façade looks vaguely African and is perhaps a reference to the old colonial imagery that haunts so much of Edith’s texts. In their kaleidoscopic, carnivalesque way, they endlessly refer to ‘shady ladies’, ‘negresses’ and ‘hottentots’: verbal offences these days but arising from an attitude of Empire that celebrated, in its way, the otherness of distant cultures.
Echoes of Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Satie
It isn’t easy to imagine what the invited audience made of it all – the cloth, the face, the hole, the megaphone, the noise – as they squeezed into the Sitwell drawing room in Carlyle Square for that first performance, on 24 January 1922. Walton’s score – conceived and orchestrated with an ear to Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and Satie’s Parade – used only six players, but with instruments designed to penetrate. And it’s telling that after the performance, everybody was served hot rum punch: intended, Edith said, as a restorative for ‘those who had lost their way in a voyage of discovery’.
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Here's the great Glenn Gould exploring Façade:
Dobson’s screen came out again just two weeks later, for a second private performance at a house in Montagu Square. But not until June 1923 did it really come under the spotlight, with Façade’s first public performance at Aeolian Hall: an event that proved explosive, although on a scale that varies from one eye-witness to another.
'We went about London feeling as if we had committed a murder’
The Sitwells – always happy to be persecuted in the cause of art – recorded the event as a tumultuous scandal. ‘I was warned to stay… hidden behind the curtain, until they [the hostile public] got tired of waiting for me and went home,’ wrote Edith. ‘For several weeks we were obliged to go about London feeling as if we had committed a murder,’ wrote Osbert. ‘When we entered a room there would fall a sudden, unpleasing hush.’
Walton, more laconically, thought it a ‘shambles’. And the truth seems to be that it fell apart in a mixture of embarrassment and giggles – which would be unsurprising, given how difficult a piece it is. Some of the texts are near-impossible to speak at speed. The instrumental writing can be virtuoso.
Either way, the press enjoyed a priceless opportunity for disapproval. ‘Drivel they paid to hear,’ complained the Daily Graphic, with advice that it was ‘time this sort of thing were stopped’. ‘Very depressing, but raises the status of the megaphone,’ thought the Sunday Express. And adding lustre to a celebrity audience (which included Evelyn Waugh, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf) was Noël Coward, who was moved to write a joyous parody of the whole event in his next revue, London Calling!
It featured a Miss Hernia Whittlebot with her brothers Gob and Sago, reciting verse with lines like: ‘Your mouth is my mouth/ And our mouth is their mouth/ And their mouth is Bournemouth.’ Edith was appalled, not least because she imagined (for no obvious reason) that it depicted her as lesbian. Walton, cool as ever, thought it ‘really not unfunny’.
Walton's music has an infectious, upbeat vigour
Quite how funny the original Façade was meant to be is questionable. Edith made great claims for it as an experiment in rhyme and rhythm, freighted with ‘violent exhilaration and veiled melancholy’. And to the extent that meaning can be plucked from the texts’ tangled webs of nonsense, there’s an undoubted darkness lurking in the images. As one of the poems puts it, ‘Something lies behind the scene.’
But the salon-chic of Walton’s music offers safer space. It may be spikily acerbic, but its cheerful parodies of well-known melodies and dance forms come with an infectious, upbeat vigour. As Façade’s collaborators all agreed, because they authorised the word, it was an ‘entertainment’. And Frank Dobson’s cloth tells you as much.
It got replaced in 1943 by a more detailed, dreamily romanticised successor – painted by John Piper, who had recently been painting dreamily romantic views of Renishaw, the Sitwells’ country house in Derbyshire. But the original by Dobson has a frivolity and raw bravado. It provoked attention back in 1922, and still does. Now the tissue-paper wraps are off.