A century ago, on January 24 1922, in a Chelsea drawing room, there premiered a startling entertainment that baffled almost everyone present. Across the room, a large curtain had been hung. It was a painted cloth, at its centre a disturbing, mask-like image of a face. Its eyes were closed, its mouth an enormous hole through which protruded a papier-mache megaphone. Behind the cloth, concealed from view, crouched four musicians. A poet clasped the megaphone, a composer raised his baton. White light from snow in the London square outside cast an eerie glow over the gaping mouth.

On offer, typewritten programmes indicated, was: “Miss Edith Sitwell on her Sengerphone, with accompaniment, overture and interlude by WT Walton.” The eldest of the three eccentric children of baronet Sir George Sitwell, Edith was 34 and, like her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell, unmarried. For five years, she had edited a modernist poetry anthology called Wheels. 

The composer William Walton, then 22, had yet to make his name. A friend of Sacheverell, known as “Sachie”, beneficiary of a laid-back sort of patronage on the part of the artistic brothers, he was lodging in their attic. That night, in the brothers’ violet-, pink- and blue-painted drawing room, in front of an audience warmed by rum punch spiked with green tea and sherry, Edith initiated the best known of what Osbert would later call the patrician siblings’ “series of skirmishes and hand-to-hand battles against the Philistine”.

The entertainment was Façade. In its first version, 18 of Edith’s poems were set to music for trumpet, clarinet, flute, cello and drums, by Walton. Did anyone understand what they heard? “Long steel grass – The white soldiers pass – The light is braying like an ass,” intoned Edith with sly humour: more than anything else she wrote, Façade provided grounds for Leonard Woolf’s view that Edith Sitwell was “up to the neck in modernity”.

In the short term, it earned her more opprobrium than admiration. The Tatler judged a performance the following month: “Almost bizarre, in fact. A huge and grotesque face, behind which sat Edith Sitwell shouting out her poems through a megaphone! It’s a new idea at any rate, but nobody seemed quite able to make up their minds if it was clever or merely mad!” A year later, critics at Façade’s first public performance – at the Aeolian Hall on June 12 1923 – made up their minds. The Daily Graphic called it “drivel they paid to hear”. “Surely,” suggested the Mr London gossip column, “it is time that this sort of thing were stopped.”