William Walton (1902-1983) had written nine film scores by the time he and Laurence Olivier collaborated on Henry V, the first of three Shakespeare plays they adapted for the movies (the others were Hamlet and Richard III). Composed between 1943 and 1944 and relapsed that year, the film was an enormous success and Walton's score was nominated for an Academy Award. Twenty-nine years later, Walton authorized the English conductor Muir Mathieson, the conductor of the original film score and one of Walton's closest musical colleagues, to create a suite from the film music. The orchestral score is in five movements: "Overture—The Globe Playhouse," a splendid piece used to accompany the film's opening aerial view of London; "Passacaglia—Death of Falstaff," a slow and sorrowful piece for string orchestra; "Touch her soft lips and part," a second piece for string orchestra of unutterable tenderness; "Charge and Battle," a brilliant battle piece for full orchestra closing with a poignant French folk song played by the English horn; and "Agincourt Song," another traditional tune given the full orchestra treatment. Malcolm Sargent, one of the more successful mid-century English conductors, also arranged all of the above but "Charge and Battle" for chorus in 1945, and while Mathieson's orchestral suite has obtained fair popularity in the concert hall and on record, Sargent's choral suite has rarely been revived.

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