Horace Walpole
The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole was born in 1717, four
years before his father, Sir Robert Walpole,
became Prime Minister. He himself was an
M.P. from 1741 to 1768. He died in 1797.
In 1747, Walpole leased a small house he
called Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, near
London. Two years later he bought it and
began remodelling it as a ‘little Gothic
castle,’ later adding a cloister, gallery and
tower.
In 1757, Walpole set up a printing press at
Strawberry Hill, publishing his own
Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors
(1758) and Anecdotes of Painting in England
(1762–1771) as well as a dramatic tragedy,
The Mysterious Mother, in 1768. In 1785,
Walpole published Hieroglyphic Tales.
Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto
between June and August of 1764. He tried
to pass it off as an actual translation, from
the original Italian, of a medieval text written
by ‘Onuphrio Muralto’. The first edition of
five hundred copies soon sold out, and
Walpole admitted, in the second edition
published the following year, that the work was his own. The book has rarely, if ever,
been out of print since.
The Castle of Otranto is often called the
first Gothic novel. It contains almost all the
classic elements: a foreign setting, walking
skeleton, haunted castle, long-lost child
identified by his birthmark, ominous threats
and events leading to a dénouement that
seems unavoidable because it is the logical
conclusion of all the converging, providential
actions in the plot.
The Castle of Otranto wonderfully
combines the inner turmoils of a most
demonic villain—one can almost see the
toasting-fork tail under his fine clothes—a
valiant hero, whose strength lies in his
innocent willingness to go along with his
fate; ineffectual, well-meaning friars, a
psychic hermit and virtuous maidens.
All the internal struggles are played out
against the most dramatic landscape of
snaking dungeon passages, lightning-struck
battlements, thick woods and huge
supernatural coats of armour waving giant
black plumes at castle windows.
The inner and outer aspects of the story
are so perfectly matched that it is hard to
know which is having most effect and
driving the plot. There is, for the listener, a
satisfying inevitability that gathers force as
the story unrolls, that comes from being
caught up in something much larger than
the mere mortal. This illuminates the action
as dramatically as lightning hits the castle,
and makes it as fresh and thrilling today as
when it was first devised.
The Gothic novel has been extensively
parodied. Here is the real thing—larger-thanlife
emotions that have a power and
intensity overwhelmingly their own.
Notes by Lesley Young
The music on this recording is taken from the NAXOS catalogue
TANEYEV Symphonies Nos 2 and 4
8.223196
Polish State Philharmonic Orchestra (Katowice)/Stephen Gunzenhauser
BERLIOZ Symphonie Fantastique
8.550093
CSR Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava)/Pinchas Steinberg
TCHAIKOVSKY The Tempest
(Fantasias after Shakespeare)
8.553017
Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Katowice)/Antoni Wit
TCHAIKOVSKY Manfred Symphony
8.550224
CSR Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava)/Ondrej Lenard
Music Programming by Sarah Butcher
