Sir William Walton

Sir William Walton was born in Oldham, Lancashire, in March 1902, the son of a choirmaster and a contralto. He was admitted to Christ Church Cathedral Choir School in Oxford in 1912 and went on to Christ Church itself as an undergraduate, where he twice failed his exams but met the Sitwell siblings — Sacheverell, Osbert and Edith — who effectively adopted him into their household after his Oxford failure. The entertainment *Façade*, with Edith Sitwell’s poems and Walton’s score (1922, revised 1923), made his name when he was just twenty-one.

His mature output — modest in volume by the standards of his generation, but central to twentieth-century British music — included the *Viola Concerto* (1929), the cantata *Belshazzar’s Feast* (1931), the First Symphony (1935), the *Crown Imperial* coronation march (1937), the Violin Concerto (1939), the *Variations on a Theme by Hindemith* (1963), and two operas: *Troilus and Cressida* (1954) and the chamber-scaled *The Bear* (1967). His extensive film music — *Hamlet*, *Henry V* and *Richard III* for Olivier, *Battle of Britain*, *Henry V* (1944) — set the standard for British concert-style film scoring in the 1940s and 1950s.

Walton was knighted in 1951, appointed OM in 1968, and lived for the last thirty years of his life on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. He died there in March 1983. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his orchestral, choral and operatic work.