William Walton

Born in the industrial town of Oldham in northern England, the British composer William Walton discovered an early gift for composition while studying at Christ Church College, Oxford. There, he fell in with a set of fashionable young artists, who launched him onto the avant-garde cultural scene of one of 1920s London, and one of whom, the poet Edith Sitwell, wrote the words for his first major hit – the surreal "entertainment" Façade (1923). Scandalising conventional opinion, Façade established Walton as an enfant terrible of British music, a reputation reinforced by energetic, jazz-influenced scores such as Portsmouth Point (1928) and the choral cantata Belshazzar's Feast (1931). The Viola Concerto (1929) pointed towards a more lyrical, melancholic vein of inspiration and with the premiere of his impassioned, often violent First Symphony (1934-5) Walton was recognised as a national figure capable of composing marches such as Crown Imperial for the coronation of King George VI (1937). During the Second World War, Walton channelled his energies into writing scores for morale-boosting films, including Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944), before relocating, postwar, to the Italian island of Ischia, where he explored a warmer and more songful side to his creativity in the opera Troilus and Cressida (1954) and a frequently played Cello Concerto (1956). At the time of his death in 1983 he was widely regarded as Britain's pre-eminent living composer.