Quiz #3 And the winner is…….

Commissioned by the BBC, Belshazzar’s Feast (1930–31) is a sardonic inversion of the ‘dramatic cantata’ beloved by Victorian composers and audiences. Osbert Sitwell’s libretto consists of cunning juxtapositions of Old Testament excerpts that draw implicit parallels between the excesses and downfall of the Babylonian monarch and the opulence and eventual implosion of Edwardian society. Rather than using Biblical texts to express religious sentiment, Sitwell uses them to titillate. The audience at the première must have been discomfited by the perverse innuendo of the cantata’s opening line: ‘Thus spake Isaiah: Thy sons that thou shalt beget, They shall be taken away/And be eunuchs in the palace of the King of Babylon’.

Walton’s music colludes fully with Sitwell’s text in its intent to subvert Edwardian mores. The real protagonists of Belshazzar’s Feast, the captive Jewish people represented by the chorus, react with the ferocious indignation of powerless outsiders forced to serve an oppressive society. Walton, himself a Lancastrian outsider at Oxford and in London, vividly contrasted the searing anguish of the Jewish slaves with a caricature of the garish ostentation of Belshazzar’s court. A parody of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches erupts as a paean of praise to Belshazzar’s God of Gold to cleverly characterize Babylonian decadence through a specific reference to an Edwardian musical style.