Just as with Weill in Weimar and Milhaud in France, the interwar years in England saw the emergence of an aesthetic characterized by a surreal detachment and alienation—not only between audience and work, but between elements of works themselves. In the early 1920s, poet Edith Sitwell noticed trends towards abstraction in sculpture and painting, and sought to pursue similar ideas in English verse. As her brother Osbert described, Edith "had lately—in 1920 and 21—written various dance measures and abstract poems of transcendent technical skill.... A young musician, William Walton, was then sharing a house with us, and we decided together that he should set the poems to music, and that they should be presented in as abstract a manner as possible."

So abstract was the product of their collaboration, in fact, that the premiere given on June 12, 1923, under the title Façade, places it within that elite canon of musical works that provoked their opening-night audiences to riot. Osbert again recalls the scene: "...seldom has there been such an outburst of critical rage and hysteria in an audience.... At the end my sister was warned not to leave the shelter of her dressing room until the crowd had dispersed, or she might meet with injury."

Perhaps most challenging were Sitwell's nonsensical texts, which wander with semantic abandon through fields of disconnected imagery and syntactical dead ends. Anything serves as linguistic glue here: meaning, rhyme, assonance, association. This kind of poetry seems to sit just this side of the fence, on the other side of which Hugo Ball's indecipherable Dadaist syllable collections reside. By retaining words and stringing them together in such a sonorous way, Sitwell lends the work a rather distinct level of meaning—or perhaps more accurately, a unique level of meaninglessness. All the components of speech are there, and in the right positions (subjects, objects, modifiers, etc.) but they combine into a delightfully dysfunctional train of thought.

That description is apt when applied to the music as well. Just as the ambiguity of the text subverts its own construction, Walton's music occupies a strange place of parody and allusion: most of the numerous pieces (ranging in number from ten to thirty, depending on which version of the work is performed) are caricatures of geographically-specific styles, as reflected in titles like "Swiss Yodelling Song," "Scotch Rhapsody," "Noche Espagnole," and "Tango-Pasodoble." The various chamber combinations within the ensemble are purposely inelegant, with extroverted fanfare and oompah. Within the context of Walton's score, one can almost think of the reciter's part as yet another instrument, one separated from the others only by the articulatory breadth of speech. The words are delivered in a kind of self-conscious public-address monotone, but in strict and often lively rhythm. The speaker is hidden from the audience, and speaks through a megaphone placed in the mouth of a large and rather grotesque face painted on a scrim.

Walton extracted an orchestral suite from Façade in 1926, and then another in 1938. In 1977, he produced a sequel, Façade II, which returned to the original chamber ensemble and narration format. Also a setting of Edith Sitwell's poetry, this second suite has seen performances by such esteemed performers of new music as Peter Pears and Cathy Berberian, to whom it is dedicated.

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