Walton, Sir William Turner 1902-83
English composer

Born in Oldham, Lancashire, he was a cathedral chorister at Christ Church, Oxford, before going to university in 1918. The same year, he wrote his first major work, a piano quartet, which was performed at the Salzburg festival of contemporary music in 1923. His Fa�ade (1923), originally accompanied by declamatory verses by Edith Sitwell, subsequently reappeared as a pair of suites and as ballet music. Scored for an unusual instrumental combination containing saxaphone and varied percussion, it caricatures conventional song and dance forms. Belshazzar's Feast (1931), a biblical cantata with libretto by Osbert Sitwell, is a powerful work in which instrumentation for an augmented orchestra is contrasted with moving unaccompanied choral passages. His ballet music for The Wise Virgins (1940), based on pieces by J S Bach, contains a concert favourite in his orchestral arrangement of the aria Sheep May Safely Graze. During World War II he began composing incidental music for films and showed great flair for building up tension and atmosphere, as in Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955). Later works include the opera Troilus and Cressida (1954), a cello concerto (1956), a second symphony and a song cycle, Anon in Love (1960), A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table (1962), and a comic opera, The Bear (1967).

Bibliography: S Walton, William Walton (1988)