Belshazzar's Feast

It is the loudest and most technically demanding thing in the standard British choral repertoire, and the extra bands are the reason a choral society that can manage Elgar and Verdi will still hesitate over this.

The text was assembled by Osbert Sitwell from the Book of Daniel, with material from Psalm 137 and the Book of Revelation. It is not a liturgical work and not an oratorio in the older sense. There is no plot to follow beyond the single event named in the title: the Babylonian king holds a feast using the vessels looted from the temple in Jerusalem, writing appears on the wall, and the king is killed that night.

What the work needs on stage

The forces are the first fact about Belshazzar's Feast and the first obstacle to performing it. Walton's original conception was smaller, for a chamber choir and modest orchestra, and it grew during composition until the Leeds festival, which had the resources of a large festival chorus and a full orchestra, could accommodate it. The two brass bands were a late addition made at the suggestion of Sir Thomas Beecham, and they were added on the reasoning that the piece was unlikely ever to be repeated.

Why the chorus writing is hard

The chorus does not accompany this piece, it drives it, and it is asked to do four things that ordinary choral repertoire does not ask.

• Sing chromatic entries with no supporting harmony underneath. Singers pitch a note against a percussion chord or against nothing at all, so the usual trick of finding your note in the accompaniment fails.
• Hold eight independent parts in double chorus passages, where each choir has its own rhythm and the two are deliberately set against one another.
• Declaim rather than sing across long stretches. Whole passages are near shouted at the top of the range, and the announcement of the king's death is a single word delivered by the full chorus with maximum force.
• Change character instantly. The work moves from unaccompanied lament to full volume brass and chorus with no transition, sometimes within two bars.

The tenor writing is the usual point of failure in amateur performance. It sits high, it is exposed, and it is loud, and a section of a dozen amateur tenors will be worn out well before the end if the chorus master has not paced the rehearsals. A society preparing this will typically spend a full season on it rather than the usual term.

Why the rhythm is hard

Rhythm is the second difficulty and the one that separates Belshazzar's Feast from every earlier British choral work. Walton changes time signature constantly, sometimes bar by bar, and writes syncopation across the barline so that the accented note is rarely the first beat. A conductor beating a plain four pattern cannot get through the piece: the beat has to shift between two, three, five and seven within a single page, and the chorus, the two brass bands and the orchestra must all take the change from the same gesture.

The jazz influence is real and audible in the writing for the alto saxophone and in the dance rhythms of the central section, but it is written out precisely rather than left to the players. Nothing here is improvised, and the notation is more difficult to read than it sounds. Percussionists in particular find that a passage that sounds like a driving pulse is notated as an irregular pattern that must be counted exactly.

Getting hold of the score

Walton died in 1983, so Belshazzar's Feast remains in copyright and is not available from the free public score libraries such as IMSLP that carry Elgar and Holst. Vocal scores are bought or hired from the publisher, and the full score and orchestral parts, including the parts for the two brass bands, are hire only. That has a practical consequence for programme planning: the hire fee for a work of this size is a real budget line, and it is charged per performance.

The vocal score contains the chorus and solo parts with a piano reduction that is genuinely unplayable in places, because the orchestral writing does not reduce to two hands. Rehearsal accompanists commonly simplify it, which means the chorus does not hear the real harmony until the orchestral rehearsal, and this is one reason first orchestral rehearsals for this work go badly more often than for anything else in the repertoire.

Where it sits in the repertoire

Belshazzar's Feast changed what a British choral work could be, and the change was one of register rather than of scale. Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius of 1900 is longer and needs three soloists, and Handel's Messiah of 1741 runs about two and a quarter hours, so length was never the innovation. What Walton did in 1931 was write for a large amateur chorus in a violent, percussive, rhythmically modern idiom, at a moment when the festival tradition expected sacred texts treated reverently. The Leeds audience got a work about a massacre, scored for anvil and brass bands.

It has stayed in the repertoire because the effect is worth the trouble, and because choruses want to sing it. It is programmed most often at festivals and in halls with an organ and a gallery, usually as the second half of a concert with a shorter work before the interval, since at about 35 minutes it is too long to open and too short to fill an evening. The two brass bands, added on the assumption that nobody would ever perform the piece again, are now the detail most often mentioned when it is announced.

Also in this programme

• The repertoireThe pieces that keep coming back, and why
• Edward ElgarThe Enigma Variations, the Cello Concerto and the symphonies
• Ralph Vaughan WilliamsThe Tallis Fantasia, the Lark and the symphonies
• What conductors earnWhat conductors earn, and why the number is so hard to pin down