Walter J. Turner

Who was Walter J. Turner?

Walter James Redfern Turner was an Australian-born, English-domiciled writer and critic.

Born in South Melbourne, the son of a church musician – organist at St Paul's Cathedral – and a warehouseman, Walter James Turner, and a woman of long golden hair, Alice May, 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. On 5 April 1918, in Chelsea, he married Delphine Marguerite Dubuis. During the period from the First World War until the mid-1930s, he was known primarily as a poet. His 1916 'Romance' 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. But today, although Turner produced several novels and plays, as well as books of poems, his reputation rests on his musical biographies of Mozart, Beethoven and Berlioz. He 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." His Mozart in has been reprinted many times in the 70 years since it was first published. Some of his musical articles for the New Statesman and other journals were reprinted in Music and Life, Facing the Music, Musical Meanderings, and Variations on the theme of Music.