Walton's earliest film scores were modest affairs, mainly composed for public information and propaganda shorts made by the wartime Ministry of Information and the BBC. In 1943, at the height of World War II, a production of Shakespeare's Henry V was conceived in a collaboration between the British filmmaker Dallas Bower, the actor Laurence Olivier and the producer Filippo de Giudice. Walton was commissioned to write the music, which turned out to be far from "incidental." The composer planned almost everything with Olivier, who, when the film was released in 1944, said that the music had "more guts, more spunk, more attack, more venom than one would have thought was hidden in Walton's personality."

The score subtly captures the contrast between the troubled times of Henry V and the relative calm of the early Elizabethan period. The opening scenes at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre contain evocative, but never imitative, echoes of Elizabethan theater music. In some parts plainchant is used to create an atmosphere, but in general the style is very much of the twentieth century. A beautiful Passacaglia accompanies the death of Falstaff, and Mistress Quickly sings a sad song of farewell to the old knight. Throughout the film, the clichés so often associated with screen epics are absent. The French scenes use an adaptation of an Auvergne song called "Baliëro," and the Battle of Agincourt is a tour de force combining natural noises with a truly terrifying sound picture of the onslaught. Even when the music is at its most intense, Shakespeare's text is always given room to reach its full stature. Unusually, the battle music was written before the shooting of the film, and the action was tailored to fit it. The Duke of Burgundy's despairing speech after the battle is accompanied by pastoral music.

Such characteristic music stands easily on its own merits. A suite containing concert versions of four numbers appeared in 1945, another was put together by the conductor Malcolm Sargent, and a third was arranged by Muir Matheson (who conducted the film score) for the 1964 Shakespeare birthday celebrations. All are representative of the high standard of the original pieces, and all contain the overture "The Globe Playhouse," "The Death of Falstaff," the song "Touch her Soft Lips and Part," and the "Agincourt Song."

It may fairly be said that no film score has earned such praise and enjoyed such durability; indeed, Lord Olivier once remarked in a radio interview, "I have always said that if it wasn't for the music Henry V would not have been the success that it was."



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