William Walton

German musicians, from the height of their undisputed hegemony in musical history, call Britain "the land without music" (Das Land Ohne Musik). In the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this appellation could also be taken as true. The last composer to make a significant contribution to the music of the British Isles in the early and mid-eighteenth century was Georg Friedrich Handel, who ironically was German, though he died a British subject in the English capital in 1759. He devoted more than three decades of his life to working for the Royal Academy of Music in London and Covent Garden. After nearly two centuries, English music was rehabilitated with the opuses of Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gaining widespread recognition through the work of Benjamin Britten and WILLIAM WALTON. Later on it entered the late twentieth century with the new directions of Brian Ferneyhough, Harrison Birtwistle, and took leading positions in a number of popular styles. A hereditary musician, William Walton lived and practiced in a musical environment early on, and sang in church. His first compositions were intended for the church service, and he therefore formed a specific singing manner. He studied with a scholarship at Oxford with a remarkable teacher for his time, Hugh Allen. It was probably from him that he adopted an interest in all styles and means of expression from Renaissance to modern, which he would subsequently manifest in his own music. He did not receive a German or French education, did not seriously master the playing of any instrument, but he spent hours exploring the scores of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Les Six, Sibelius and the style of jazz. He approached them in melodic and harmonic structures, touch, phrasing and expression. His oeuvre is varied, though not particularly large-scale. It spans genres from performance music to instrumental and choral works to soundtracks; from his pseudo-baroque Prelude and Fugue through a compilation of New Viennese-style pieces to parodies of popular tunes. He is the author of two symphonies in a similarly compilative style, and two operas, one historical, Troilus and Cressida (1954), premiered at Covent Garden, the other comic, The Bear, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation (1967). Walton composed the music for all three of Laurence Olivier's films on Shakespeare plays: Hamlet, Henry V and Richard III, as well as the music for two coronations: of George VI (1937) and Elizabeth II (1953). Without being groundbreaking, Walton's music finds its place with its communicative national and emotional signature. In 1951 he was bestowed the title "sir".