Remembering Sir William Walton

Sir William Walton may not seem the most likely subject for a best-selling biography. After all, the English composer’s most controversial, celebrated piece, “Facade,” was first performed in 1922, and from 1949 to his death in 1983 Walton lived in semireclusion on an island in the Bay of Naples.

But Lady Susana Walton, the composer’s widow, has accomplished the feat with “William Walton: Behind the Facade.” Published in February, the book has already spent three weeks on the British best-seller lists, according to the author, who was in Los Angeles this week promoting her work.

Credit the startling, genial candor of the book for that. Whether in discussing her husband’s lovers or the musical and sexual habits, failings and intrigues of seemingly most of Britain and Europe, Lady Susana hides nothing behind initials or allusions.

“William was always inventing stories to put people off the trail,” she says of her husband’s desire for privacy. Would she make up anything in these memoirs?

“Really and truly, everything in the book is absolutely true,” she exclaimed, laughing. “That’s why I had to write the book, because these things get lost and forgotten in time.”

Her zesty publicizing of private lives has provoked only one negative response, according to Lady Susana. One part of the book--which was excerpted in the daily press--recounts her husband’s troubled dealings with record producer Walter Legge. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Legge’s widow, wrote a letter to the London Times defending her husband’s honor.

The author does not spare herself, either. The daughter of an Argentine lawyer, 22-year-old Susana Gil Passo married Walton in Buenos Aires after a two-week courtship, leaving her family and homeland to accompany her 46-year-old husband to England, and then a nearly eremitic life on the island of Ischia. His insistence that the marriage remain childless soon led her to a kitchen-table abortion.

“I dedicated my life to him,” she said. “He was very much worth the effort.”

Her dedication and effort continue today, through the William Walton Trust and the Fondazione Walton. She is opening the gardens of their estate, La Mortella (The Myrtle), to the public and attempting to create a study center for young musicians there, with a recital hall under construction.

“He felt very strongly that young artists needed help,” Lady Susana said. She is planning six weeks of master classes at La Mortella this summer, with artists such as Margaret Price, Yehudi Menuhin and Ivo Pogorelich mentioned as participants.

Progress toward that goal has been slow, however. The purchase of many of Walton’s manuscripts by Frederick Koch--who has loaned them to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York--has helped finance the effort, and the profits from the biography are also destined to support the project.

“The place where an artist has lived and worked so long gets imbued with a special spirit,” she said. “The only way to preserve a place is to make it live.”

IN DANCE: Tonight at 7:30 in Shrine Auditorium, Maya Plisetskaya and a company of 14 from the Bolshoi Ballet make a single local appearance under auspices of the Ambassador Foundation. The program lists highlights from the Bolshoi repertoire, including Fokine’s “The Dying Swan,” which has become a Plisetskaya signature piece, and Roland Petit’s “La Rose Malade.” . . . Works by guest choreographers Jonathan Wolken and Kitty Sue McCoy, as well as new pieces by faculty choreographers Pat Finot, Jeff Slayton and Tryntje Shapli make up the program by the Cal State Long Beach Dance Company, to be presented Thursday through Saturday night at 8 in University Theatre at CSLB . . . . Appearing as guests during the 1988 spring season of American Ballet Theatre in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York will be Altynai Assylmuratova and Faruk Ruzimatov, principals of the Kirov Ballet of Leningrad. Both dancers will perform in the full-length “La Bayadere,” May 28 and 30 . . . . The National Ballet of Canada will give seven performances in Pasadena Civic Auditorium, May 30-June 5, sponsored by the Ambassador Foundation. The programs at Pasadena Civic will feature one Los Angeles premiere, Glen Tetley’s “Alice,” and two company premieres here, John Cranko’s “Onegin” and Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments.” . . . After an absence of more than a decade, the Georgian State Dance Company of the U.S.S.R. returns to the United States this summer, appearing at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, July 26-Aug. 7. The three-month tour begins at Wolf Trap Farm in Virginia and includes stops in New York, Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Miami and San Francisco.

ALSO THIS WEEK: Vladimir Feltsman, the recent Soviet emigre, makes his West Coast debut Monday night, on a Pension Fund Benefit concert for the players of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Assisted by the Philharmonic and conductor Andre Previn, Feltsman will play Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto on a program also listing Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. . . . Speaking of Rachmaninoff, the young French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet will play that composer’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini at the season-closing concert by the Pasadena Symphony, Saturday night at 8:30 in Pasadena Civic Auditorium. To be conducted by music director Jorge Mester, the program also offers Ravel’s Suites Nos. 1 and 2 from “Daphnis et Chloe and the Symphony No. 2 by Ellen Taafe Zwilich. . . . Karon Poston, Martha Jane Weaver and Peter Derick will be the soloists when the William Hall Chorale and Orchestra present a Brahms concert, next Sunday at 3 p.m. in Pasadena Civic Auditorium. William Hall will conduct. . . . Clarinetist Gary Gray, violist Milton Thomas and pianist Brooks Smith are the members of the Bravura Trio, appearing today at 4 p.m. in Royce Hall, UCLA.

GRANTS: Opera Pacific has received an unsolicited, general support grant in the amount of $61,000 from the San Francisco-based Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. . . . The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra has received a grant of $52,000 from Toyota to cover the cost of broadcasting this season’s concerts, which have been recorded by KUSC-FM. The 13-week series began April 14, and will continue on Thursday nights on KUSC-FM (91.5) at 7, through July 7. American Public Radio network will carry the concerts nationally. . . . Los Angeles-based soprano Mary Rawcliffe has received a $7,000 Solo Recitalist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to support a recital in New York this year. . . . The Ford Foundation will give $900,000 over three years and the Pew Memorial Trust has contributed $450,000 to a program to fund collaborations between American composers and choreographers, administered by Meet the Composer. . . . The Brown Foundation has awarded Houston Grand Opera a $5-million challenge grant. The bulk of the money is destined for the company’s endowment fund. . . . The Ford Foundation has given $100,000 to the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C., for a three-year program, “The Black Tradition in American Modern Dance.” The National Endowment for the Humanities also contributed $72,451.