The Quest (ballet)
The Quest is a ballet score by William Walton, written for a ballet of the same title, now lost, choreographed by Frederick Ashton in 1943. Two versions of the score exist: one for the small orchestra for which Walton wrote (because of wartime constraints), and a posthumously constructed version rescored for an orchestra of the larger size usually favoured by the composer. The ballet, with a scenario by Doris Langley Moore, was based on "The Faerie Queene" by Edmund Spenser. It was first given by the Sadler's Wells Ballet company. Background and first performances. By the  1940s Walton was an established composer, known for works including a symphony, three concertos, the cantata "Belshazzar's Feast" and the "entertainment" "Façade". From the last, he had fashioned two orchestral suites, which the choreographer Frederick Ashton used for his 1931 ballet "Façade". During the Second World War Walton worked with the Army Film Unit and Ashton was in the Royal Air Force. Kenneth Clark, an influential figure in the arts world, secured Ashton six weeks' leave of absence from the Air Ministry to create a new ballet for the Sadler's Wells company. By 1943 the company was performing  mostly away from London, taking ballet round the country, with its dancers, orchestra and backstage staff heavily depleted by wartime conscription. Ashton chose to create what he later called "a piece of wartime propaganda", depicting the triumph of good over evil. He chose a story from "The Faerie Queene" by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, and quickly chose his collaborators to get the piece created and staged within six weeks. The scenario was by his friend Doris Langley Moore, the costumes and scenery by John Piper and the music by Walton. Robert Helpmann played the hero, Saint George, opposite Margot  Fonteyn as Una, the personification of Truth. Her alter ago, played by Beryl Grey, was Duessa, "the scarlet whore", embodying Falsehood. The Seven Deadly Sins led by Pride appear in Scene 3 and holiness returns in the fifth and final scene with Faith, Hope and Charity. Walton's music, composed in great haste, followed the scenario carefully, though without great enthusiasm on his part. A slow and painstaking writer as a rule, he called on Roy Douglas and Ernest Irving to help with the orchestration. He wrote of "The Quest" in 1957: The ballet was premiered on 7 April 1943  at the New Theatre in London and then taken out on tour. It was well received at the premiere, and, despite the composer's reservations, was a success, being given 93 performances over the next two years. The ballet historian Geraldine Morris suggests that the work fell out of favour after the war because of its wartime "propagandist, patriotic elements". One critic wrote in 1943 that "The Quest" should be seen by everyone, "for as the curtain falls one is tempted to cry with Shakespeare: 'God for Harry, England and St George'". After 1945 the work dropped out of the  repertoire and Ashton's choreography is now lost. Music. Score. The ballet music takes about 40 minutes in performance. The performing edition of the score published by the Oxford University Press and edited by John Eric Floreen and Christopher Palmer is scored for three flutes (two doubling piccolos), two oboes (one doubling cor anglais), two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, one tuba, two harps, and percussion comprising timpani, glockenspiel, xylophone, tam-tam, cymbals and suspended cymbal, bass drum, side drum, snare drum, tambourine, castanets, triangle, wood block, temple blocks, whip, tubular bells, sleigh bells, and piano , celeste and strings. Walton's score follows the five-scene plot of the ballet. Walton's biographer Michael Kennedy writes of the music of "The Quest": Versions. The score was lost for several years after the war, but the music scholar and critic John Warrack tracked it down to a London warehouse. With Walton's approval the conductor Vilém Tauský extracted a four-movement suite from the score, which Tauský premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in June 1961. Walton recorded the suite with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1970. For this suite, about 13 minutes in length, Tauský −  with Walton's approval − added extra instruments in the orchestral parts, bringing the originally small orchestra up to more Waltonian proportions. In the late 1980s, the musical scholar Christopher Palmer reconstructed the five-movement ballet score, further amplifying the original sparer orchestration. This version was recorded by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bryden Thomson. Ten years later the conductor David Lloyd-Jones edited the original score for a new recording, restoring some passages cut by Walton (and Palmer), and largely reverting to the smaller orchestral forces of the 1943 score. 1972 ballet. In 1972 the choreographer Joe Layton  used Walton's music for a ballet about Oscar Wilde, "O.W.", given by the Royal Ballet at Sadler's Wells Theatre, London. The prologue of the ballet was danced to music from "The Quest". (For the main section, Walton's Viola Concerto was used.)