Walton: Suite from Henry V
Composer William Walton (1902-1983)
If Powell’s “How to Train Your Dragon” score is an especially unlikely candidate for concert-hall popularity (composed, as it was, by a theretofore unknown composer for an animated children’s film), Walton’s music for Henry V had a few points obviously in its favor. While of course it was still just “movie music,” at least that movie was made by a recognized filmic genius (Lawrence Olivier), was a filmed version of a respected play by an unimpeachable playwright (Shakespeare’s most popular history), and its composer was at the time the most celebrated living British composer.
While Walton is thought of today as a pillar of the conservative English establishment, he was a child of the working class who was rejected in the first part of his career as a wild-eyed radical. His mother recognized his musical talent early and managed to get him enrolled in an Oxford choir school at the age of nine (she had to borrow the money for the train ticket to the lad’s entrance examination from her greengrocer, as his father had drunk away the money she’d saved for the trip at a pub the previous night). He won a scholarship to Oxford University with ease, but was so uninterested in any subject other than music that he flunked his Greek and Math exams and was unable to actually graduate. At Oxford he fell in with the literary avant-garde, and while most audiences and conservative critics detested such works as Façade, the beauty and power of his Viola Concerto and First Symphony could not be denied.
Walton spent the WWII years working for the British War Office, writing music for patriotic-themed films. The greatest of these was Olivier’s 1944 Henry V, and Walton’s music, which incorporates melodies from the Tudor period (the drinking song Watkin’s Ale supplies the repeating bass line for the death of Falstaff, and the French folk song Baïlero is played by the oboe amidst the hurly-burly of the Charge and Battle) was immediately purposed for the concert stage. The British conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent adapted a suite the following year, and the bestselling recorded LP – featuring the voice of Olivier reciting excerpts from Shakespeare’s text between movements – established the popularity that the suite has never relinquished.
See a performance
Hear Suite from “Henry V”
Chris Vaneman is the Director of the Petrie School of Music and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse College. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.