Walter James Redfern Turner (13 October 1889 – 18 November 1946) was an Australian-born, English-domiciled writer and critic.

Life

Born in South Melbourne, the son of a church musician – organist at St Paul's Cathedral – and warehouseman, Walter James Turner, and Alice May (née Watson), he was educated at Carlton State School, Scotch College and the Working Men's College. In 1907 he left for England to pursue a career in writing. There he met and befriended a number of literary intellectual figures, including Siegfried Sassoon, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and Lady Ottoline Morrell (the caricature of her in his book The Aesthetes ended their friendship). On 5 April 1918, in Chelsea, he married Delphine Marguerite Dubuis (died 1951). During the period from the First World War until the mid-1930s, he was known primarily as a poet. His 1916 Romance ("Chimborazo, Cotopaxi....") is probably the best remembered of his poems. W. B. Yeats had the highest praise for Turner's poetry, saying that it left him "lost in admiration and astonishment", and included some of it in his Oxford Book of Modern Poetry (while omitting several authors very much better known today for their verse, such as Wilfred Owen). But today, although Turner produced several novels and plays, as well as books of poems, his reputation rests on his biographies of the composers Mozart, Beethoven and Berlioz. His Mozart has been reprinted many times since it was first published in 1938. Some of his music articles for the New Statesman (where he was music critic between 1915 and 1940) and other journals were reprinted in Music and Life, Facing the Music, Musical Meanderings, and Variations on the theme of Music. Turner was musically untrained, and in the words of the music critic Charles Reid, "unhampered by any excess of technical knowledge" to restrain his "racy dogmatism". Notoriously, on the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Wagner's death, he wrote: “I can confidently and in soberness declare that Wagner is a colossal fraud.” Turner was a close friend of the pianist Artur Schnabel, about whom he frequently wrote, and with whom he frequently went hiking. He was a champion of Arturo Toscanini's conducting, which was for him a revelation in structure and expression. Siegfried Sassoon was another close friend of Turner, at least for a while. Turner, his wife, and Sassoon all cohabited a house in London, No 54 Tufton Street, before Sassoon moved out in 1925. After this he fell out with Turner so badly that he made no mention whatsoever of him in his autobiography. During the Second World War, he was general editor of the series of short illustrated books "Britain in Pictures", for which he wrote the volumes on music and ballet, and edited seven omnibus volumes. On 18 November 1946 he died at Hammersmith of a cerebral thrombosis.

Works

Poetry

Plays

Other books

Sources