William Walton's 'Belshazzar's Feast' (1931) is the most viscerally exciting piece of British choral music ever written, and also one of the most morally complex. Its subject - the fall of Babylon in Daniel 5, and the exiles' response to it - generates a sequence of emotions that the work refuses to resolve into simple piety: desolation, defiance, ferocity, and an Alleluia over the destruction of an empire that many listeners have found profoundly disturbing.
The work begins where Daniel 5 does not: with Psalm 137's lament beside the waters of Babylon. Osbert Sitwell's libretto opens with the exile's cry, 'By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept, when we remembered Zion.' This planting of the exilic lament before the feast narrative creates a crucial moral context: the violence of Babylon's fall, which the second part of the work will celebrate with terrifying force, comes after the audience has spent time inhabiting the grief of those Babylon has dispossessed. The Alleluia at the end is not the complacency of winners; it is the cry of those who have suffered.
Daniel 5:5-6 - 'Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his legs became weak and his knees were knocking' - is set by Walton with a dramatic immediacy that has no precedent in British choral music. The writing on the wall, interrupted by the terror of Belshazzar and his court, is rendered in music of calculated shock: the bass-baritone soloist's proclamation, the full chorus's response, the massive orchestral forces deployed with a ferocity that Elgar or Vaughan Williams would not have contemplated.
Revelation 18:10 - 'Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry: 'Woe! Woe to you, great city, you mighty city of Babylon! In one hour your doom has come!'' - provides the eschatological climax. The Revelation of John's celebration of Babylon's fall - which is, for John, Rome's fall - is the same moral logic as Psalm 137's imprecations against Babylon. The exiles' longing for justice becomes, in Revelation, the declaration that justice has arrived. Walton's Alleluia chorus, which closes the work with brass fanfares of almost unbearable force, is the musical expression of this eschatological vindication.
The work premiered at the Leeds Festival in 1931, with Walton's friend and collaborator Constant Lambert as one of the advocates who had pushed him toward the project. Its reception was immediate and overwhelming: the audience at Leeds recognized that something unprecedented had happened in British music. The combination of biblical ferocity, jazz-influenced rhythms, multiple brass choirs, and the sheer physical impact of the full chorus at climax was unlike anything that had been heard before.
The moral question the work raises - is it appropriate to celebrate the violent destruction of an oppressor? - has been discussed by theologians, ethicists, and music critics since its premiere. The Psalms' imprecatory tradition (Psalm 137:9 - 'Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks') is quoted in the libretto and set by Walton with unflinching directness. This refusal to smooth out the Bible's violent edges is one of the work's most important artistic and theological qualities: it takes seriously the full range of human response to oppression rather than offering the easy consolation of premature forgiveness.
It remains the most internationally performed British choral work of the twentieth century.