Whatever Walton's devotion to Elgar, I have a feeling that any admiration on Elgar's part would have been limited. They exchanged gruff pleasantries, and that was all. The unlikely place for this meeting was the gents in Hereford Cathedral, where they were using adjacent stalls. It was in the interval of a concert at the Three Choirs Festival, when Elgar was conducting his cantata, The Music Makers, and Walton his newly composed Viola Concerto. He told me that he had only once met Elgar, a composer to whose music he was devoted. Later, when my articles were published, he wrote in my copy of the Façade Entertainment an inscription that I still cherish: "For dear Ted who started the 'rot'." It was almost like being a clinical psychiatrist, asking questions of Walton as he lay comfortably on the bed. I was planning a major piece for the Guardian to coincide with his 70th birthday, and I was anxious to find out more about his early life, about which he had hitherto kept tantalisingly silent. It was during that trip to Russia that I interviewed Walton at length, in his bedroom in the Moskva Hotel.
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