Grove Koger
English composer William Walton was lucky enough to be taken up as a young man by the cosmopolitan Sitwell brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, and in 1920 the three of them traveled to Italy by train. It was Walton’s first visit to the country, and in fact his first visit abroad. As he would later recall, “There was suddenly a blinding flash and one was in Italy and there was sun everywhere. It has remained with me always, that first sight of Italy.”
There’s a tendency (which I readily admit to sharing) to read or hear or see in a work of art at least some the circumstances under which it was created. In the case of Walton, I hear a kind of Mediterranean luxuriance in his Violin Concerto (1939), which he wrote in the company of his companion, Alice Wimborne, in Ravello, an Italian resort perched nearly 1200 feet above the sea southeast of Naples. He himself admitted that the concerto reflected the love he felt for Wimborne, and he even incorporated a tarantella into the piece after being bitten by a tarantula—a reference to the belief that performing the wild dance would alleviate the effects of the bite. The composer referred to the passage as “quite gaga.” (If you’re unfamiliar with the concerto, watch this fine performance with Kyung Wha Chung on the violin and André Previn conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra. The occasion was Walton’s 80th birthday gala at Royal Festival Hall in London, and at the end you can catch a glimpse of him sitting in the Royal box.)
Walton was devastated when Wimborne died in 1948, but on a visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, shortly afterward, he met 22-year-old Susana Gil Passo, who subsequently became his wife. After their marriage, the two (seen above in a photograph from Associated Newspapers) began spending half the year on the Italian island of Ischia southwest of Naples, and took up permanent residence there in 1956. The couple went on to build a house on the promontory of Zaro overlooking the town of Forio, naming it La Mortella (“Place of Myrtles”) for the myrtle bushes they found growing there, and Susana began planting the extensive grounds with a variety of other Mediterranean and tropical plants. The photograph at the top of today’s post, taken by Roberto De Martino and reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, shows a view of the town from the property.
After her husband’s death on March 8, 1983, Susana maintained and expanded the garden, opening it to the public in 1991. Now owned and managed by the Fondazione William Walton La Mortella, the garden is regarded as one of the most beautiful in Europe, and is home to a Greek Theatre and the William Walton Museum and Archives.
If you’d like to subscribe to World Enough, enter your email address below:
And if you’ve enjoyed today’s post, please share!
World Enough 