William Walton

William Walton (1902-1983), British composer, whose work forms a distinguished contribution to modern Neo-Romantic music. Born in Oldham, he was trained as a chorister at Christ Church, Oxford, and in his youth he was associated with the British writers Osbert and Edith Sitwell. His first notable composition was Façade (1921), a suite composed to accompany recitations of poems by Edith Sitwell. Its brilliant satire of popular music forms, written when Walton was only 19, established his reputation overnight when it was first performed publicly in 1923. Most of the music for which he is best known today was written in the 1920s and 1930s: the viola concerto (1929, with Paul Hindemith as the first soloist); the 1st Symphony (1935); the very popular oratorio Belshazzar's Feast (1931), which has carried on the tradition of large-scale, English-language choral works established by Handel and continued by Mendelssohn and Elgar; and the violin concerto (1939, commissioned and first performed by Jascha Heifetz). He also wrote film music, including the score for Henry V, directed by Laurence Olivier. His works written after the war have had difficulty living up to the promise of the earlier compositions, but the quality of their craftsmanship remains just as high; they include a cello concerto (1956) written for Gregor Piatigorsky, the 2nd Symphony (1960), and the major opera Troilus and Cressida (1954).

Walton's style is generally marked by brilliant orchestration and musical wit; in more abstract works, however, his music exhibits a meditative strain. His best works show a resolution of the differing strains of his idiom: on the one hand the spiky dissonances and driving rhythms drawn from Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and the influence of jazz; on the other the ceremonial nature of the marches of Elgar. Walton was knighted in 1951.