On a rainy day in Stratford upon Avon, still – in early 2021 - gripped by the emptiness of lockdown, almost everything seems closed: the shops, the tourist sites, the theatre. The whole Shakespeare industry is dormant – other than in one small corner of the town, the Playhouse, where the locally-based Orchestra of the Swan is doing valiant business on the field of Agincourt.

It’s recording William Walton’s score for the famous wartime film of Henry V, using a reduced orchestration for 11-piece band but still managing to make sounds of suitable dimension for a battle. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Head of Music, Bruce O’Neil, conducts. Actor Kevin Whately, better known for chasing criminals as a TV detective than for conquering France as a Renaissance king, is urging on his troops in the heroic words we all remember as declaimed by Laurence Olivier. And it’s all destined for a Somm CD issued this month with Walton’s Façade sharing the space: a release timed to commemorate Façade’s centenary.

Laurence Olivier in the role of Henry V (photo: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

Façade may be the piece for which a lot of people buy the disc: its deathless popularity made it the score that Walton dourly called ‘my middle name’. But the Henry V music has also come to be one of his big-sellers. By any reckoning it counts among the great British film scores: a key document in the cinematic culture of its time, but also a work that survives independently in the form of concert adaptations. And it stands testament to the presiding role that film music assumed in Walton’s life during the years of World War II.

Around the time when he came to (precocious) maturity as a composer, in the late 1920s/early ‘30s, cinema was still a fairly new phenomenon in which ‘serious’ British musicians took an interest, though a cautious one. Vaughan Williams would encapsulate the general attitude when he recognised the medium as having ‘the potentiality for the combination of all the arts such as Wagner never dreamt of’, but nonetheless advised ‘those distinguished musicians who have entered into the world of the cinema…to realise their responsibility in helping to take the film out the realm of hack work and make it a subject worthy of a real composer’.

The association with hack work was something that would encourage many ‘real’ composers to keep their distance for a long while. But Walton threw himself into it, and from 1935 to 1969 wrote no less than 14 soundtracks. Through the years of World War II they were his staple work. And though he was in many ways unsuited to the tight schedules of an industry that could demand music overnight – being what he liked to call a composer without formal training or fluency who found it hard to write at all without the deadline of a commission – the rapid turnaround was actually a gift. It freed him from his usual, painstaking process of creation. As he said, with films ‘you haven’t time to be choosy…you just get an idea and it’s unfortunate if it’s not a good one’.

Methodologies aside, another gift of film-work was the money. Walton came from humble stock in Oldham but ascended rapidly into a more exalted social world that called for a degree of ‘keeping up’. It helped that he was good at finding wealthy women to support him; but maintaining a Belgravia lifestyle was expensive, and he understood arithmetic. Composing Crown Imperial for the coronation of King George VI paid 40 guineas. Composing the score for his first feature film, Escape Me Never, paid 300: a difference that was hard to ignore.

Escape Me Never issued in the same year, 1935, as Arthur Bliss’s score for Things to Come; and frankly it’s outclassed by Bliss. But it was nonetheless a breakthrough moment for Walton’s career because it established a relationship with the film director Paul Czinner, a Jewish émigré from Central Europe settled and working in London. Czinner then provided Walton with a stream of commissions including As You Like it(1936), Dreaming Lips (1937),  and Stolen Life (1939) – much of it not notably distinguished but providing the composer  with a useful (and what’s more, Shakespearian) introduction to Laurence Oliver who starred in As You Like It and enjoyed the mock-Tudor elements Walton had programmed (alongside mock-Delius and mock-Sibelius) into the score.

But then came war. And after one more civilian film, a 1940/1 Major Barbara for which Walton was recommended by George Bernard Shaw himself, Walton found himself called up for service – which he managed to sidestep by agreeing to work on films ‘of national importance’. Which was to say, government propaganda – designed partly to encourage patriotic zeal in homeland audiences, but also to attract Americans and keep them sympathetic to the Allied cause. The Ministry of Information had a film unit presided over by the art historian Kenneth Clark who admired Walton (despite the fact that Walton was at some point having an affair with his wife) and steered a whole batch of wartime commissions, mostly made in Ealing Studios, his way. First came Next of Kin (1941/2), for which Walton produced 32 minutes of music in 20 days. Then Foreman went to France (1941/2), conceived as a vehicle for the comedian Tommy Trinder with a script by JB Priestly and music that supplied an opportunity for Francophile fun, parodying Poulenc and Ravel. And after that, far more importantly, came First of the Few (1942) about the designer of the Spitfire plane, starring Leslie Howard and giving Walton an opportunity to shine – some of the score  extracted into what would be a stand-alone piece, Spitfire Prelude and Fugue.

William Walton, composer of the Henry V score (photo: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

In allowing that extraction, Walton went against his own declared belief that film music was ‘of no use other than what it is meant for… Which is just as it should be, otherwise it would probably not fulfil its purpose…the music should never be heard without the film’. But then, he was never given to cast-iron consistency in appraising his own business. And the fact is that the music was too good not to recycle. Working with these wartime films brought out the best in Walton, drawing on his gifts for drama, passion, conflict (which existed in sharp contrast to the quietly reserved, withdrawn private existence he preferred in real life). They also capitalised on the bold and easily absorbed immediacy of his musical language. And so it was that, with yet another war narrative under his belt – Went the Day Well (1942) – he was the obvious choice for what was the most perfect combination of art and propaganda to come out of that era, Laurence Olivier’s 1943/4 film of Henry V.

It had, for its time, a massive budget of £475,000. It deployed the only technicolour film camera available in Britain. It triumphed over the practical problems of filming amid war – with the great battle-charge filmed in neutral Ireland because there weren’t enough horses to spare in England. And from the start, the idea was that the score would take as a model the music that Prokofiev wrote for the Battle on the Ice in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. A model that demanded epic scope.

What’s more, the original intention was to privilege the music in a way that cinema rarely allows, with the film cut to fit the score rather than the other way round – which meant that Walton started writing without actual sight of the screen images. But at some point this changed into what the composer called ‘ an uncommonly close and complex collaboration of sound and screen from one bar, or visual moment, to the next’. In a concerted effort to suggest Tudor England he began by plundering period sources – William Byrd, the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, the Agincourt Song. But the result remained eclectic, not least when Olivier suggested the Auvergne song 'Bailero' as an exquisite, dreamy backdrop to the scenes in France (leading to an out-of-court settlement with Joseph Canteloube who had effectively converted the tune to private ownership). And whatever the niceties of causation, it was undoubtedly the case that, as Olivier later said, ‘the music made the film’ – leaving Walton on a professional high that would run on through more Shakespearian cinematic landmarks (Hamlet 1947, Richard III 1955) but then come unstuck in 1969 when his score for United Artists’ Battle of Britain was rejected in favour of an alternative by Ron Goodwin: a dedicated film composer whose credentials included hit soundtracks for 633 Squadron and Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines that, in the minds of the two brothers who owned the studios, made him a better bet.

It generated an almighty row, with Olivier (who yet again starred) threatening to remove his name from the credits unless at least some of Walton’s score was reinstated – a section called Battle in the Air that did indeed appear. But problems then reached intergovernmental levels when United Artists (largely, it seems, out of spite) sat on the manuscript score, refusing to allow any use of it until Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister, stepped forward and got the thing returned in time for Walton’s 70th birthday celebrations. After which its 25 minutes of music were reworked as a concert suite by Colin Matthews and recorded by the LPO under Carl Davis.

Wounded by the whole experience, Walton scored just one more film, Three Sisters (1969), and then bowed out. But at least by then his Henry V music had also acquired new life as a concert suite – or rather, several concert suites, in competing forms put together by Malcolm Sargent in 1945 and by Muir Mathieson in 1963 (recorded the same year by the Philharmonia under Walton for Columbia). The Sargent version gives you less, omitting the battle music, but was generally thought more effective until Christopher Palmer came along in 1988 and reworked the whole score for narrator and orchestra – taking his cue from an HMV recording made with Olivier (and Walton conducting the Philharmonia) as far back as 1946, but extending the amount of material into what he called a ‘Shakespeare Scenario’.

It did the rounds of concert halls with actor Christopher Plummer as the narrator, and was promptly taken into the recording studio by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and Neville Marriner for Chandos. But Palmer’s work was on a grand scale using triple woodwind, full brass, full strings, five percussion and two harps. That limited its possibilities, and put it well beyond the scope of something like the Orchestra of the Swan when they were looking for something to programme alongside Façade with forces to match Façade’s 11 players. So the answer was to turn to a suite originally commissioned by English Serenata in 1992 – one based on Palmer’s in terms of content, but with a smaller headcount.

A musician who for years had been associated with the RSC, Ted Watson, made this cut-down orchestration; and inevitably there’s a loss of weight to the result – which needless to say loses the massed voices Walton used in the originating soundtrack. But the compensation is a brightness, definition and agility that redirect the score into the realms to theatre-music. And like theatre-music, it builds impact from small forces. What your ear expects from memory is almost instantly adjusted to the circumstances of the RSC itself, or maybe Shakespeare’s Globe. The principle of conjuring a world from bare boards and a passion kicks in.

Would you always want to hear this music on these terms? Perhaps not. But it has a point, it’s viable. And there’s an argument for doing something similar with Walton’s other, less familiar film scores that don’t do the rounds as concert repertoire. There’s plenty of material. And there would surely be an audience for it…

The Orchestra of the Swan’s disc of Façade and Henry V is available from Somm Recordings - you can listen to the album via Apple Music below.