Sir William Walton(1902–1983)

William Turner Walton was born at Werneth, Oldham, in industrial Lancashire on 29 March 1902, second son of a local choirmaster and singing teacher. The household was hand-to-mouth and musical; the boy sang in the parish and chapel choirs from infancy and was admitted at ten to the Christ Church Cathedral Choir School at Oxford, on a scholarship audition his father organised in person on a borrowed five pounds for the train fare.

Christ Church gave him the training. He was admitted to the college itself as an undergraduate at sixteen, the youngest since the seventeenth century, on a music scholarship, and the Oxford circle of Sir Hugh Allen turned him onto the Stravinsky-Ravel-Schoenberg new-music tradition the post-war undergraduates were the first English audience of. He left Oxford in 1922 to make his way as a composer.

The Sitwells took him in. Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, the aristocratic patrons of the new English modernism, gave him a home at their Chelsea house for fifteen years. Façade, his setting of Edith's poems for reciter and chamber ensemble, was first performed privately there in 1922 and publicly at the Aeolian Hall in 1923; against a divided press it became the foundation work of his concert repertoire.

Belshazzar's Feast, the choral-orchestral oratorio on the Book of Daniel, was first performed at Leeds in 1931 and was the foundation event of the English choral revival of the 1930s. The Symphony No. 1, complete in 1935, took its place alongside Elgar's First and Vaughan Williams's Fifth as one of the three foundational twentieth-century English symphonies, and the coronation marches Crown Imperial (1937) and Orb and Sceptre (1953) made him the composer the Establishment turned to for state ceremonial. He was knighted in 1951 and given the Order of Merit in 1967.

His three Shakespeare film scores for Laurence Olivier, Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955), put English film music on the international map; the Henry V score in particular became the model for English literary-historical film scoring. He married Susana Gil Passo in 1948 and moved with her to the house at La Mortella on Ischia in the Bay of Naples that was the home of his last thirty-three years, writing two operas and three concertos there. He died at La Mortella on 8 March 1983, eighty years old. The Walton name, the locative walh-tūn or village of the Britons, he carried from a Lancashire choirmaster's house into the foundation of twentieth-century English concert music and English film scoring.