The English composer William Walton (1902-1983) was not only a distinguished composer of opera, oratorios, symphonies, and chamber music, he was arguably England's greatest film composer of the middle years of the twentieth century. Starting with Escape Me Never (1934) and concluding with The Sisters (1970), Walton wrote the scores for 14 films.

The undoubted climax of his film work was the series of scores he wrote for Laurence Olivier's three Shakespeare films, Henry V (1943-1944), Hamlet (1947), and Richard III (1955). Of these, the music from Hamlet is, except for the "Funeral March," the least frequently heard in the concert hall. However, this is primarily because Walton's music for Hamlet is the most fully integrated into the action of the film and he thus declined to form it into a separate concert suite. Nevertheless, the music is fits superbly with the action of the film, tracing its dramatic and psychological elements with lyrical themes and brilliant scoring.

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