THE SPITFIRE WAS WRITTEN BY SIR WILIAM WALTON IN 1942 FOR THE BRITISH FILM 'THE FIRST OF THE FEW', KNOWN AS 'SPITFIRE' IN THE U.S. THE PLOT CENTERS AROUND THE ATTACK AIRCRAFT PROTOTYPE 'SUPERMARINE SPITFIRE'. PICTURED IS THE U.S. THEATRICAL POSTER.
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Story behind the song
This is performed by the Baylor University Wind Ensemble, conducted by Michael L. Haithcock, in 1987. Baylor is the oldest institution of higher learning in Texas, and the world's largest Baptist educational institution.
The First of the Few, known as Spitfire in the United States, is a 1942 British film directed by and starring Leslie Howard as R.J. Mitchell, the designer of the Supermarine Spitfire, alongside co-star David Niven. The film's score was written by William Walton ("Spitfire Prelude and Fugue"). The film's title alludes to Winston Churchill's speech describing Battle of Britain aircrew: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
Sir William Turner Walton OM (29 March 1902 – 8 March 1983) was a British composer and conductor.
His style was influenced by the works of Stravinsky and Prokofiev as well as jazz music, and is characterized by rhythmic vitality, bittersweet harmony, sweeping Romantic melody and brilliant orchestration. His output includes orchestral and choral works, chamber music and ceremonial music, as well as notable film scores. His earliest works, especially Edith Sitwell's Façade brought him notoriety as a modernist, but it was with orchestral symphonic works and the oratorio Belshazzar's Feast that he gained international recognition.
Walton was born into a musical family, in Oldham, Lancashire, England. At the age of ten, Walton was accepted as a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, and he subsequently entered Christ Church of the University of Oxford as an undergraduate at the unusually early age of sixteen. He was largely self-taught as a composer (poring over new scores in the Ellis Library, notably those by Stravinsky, Debussy, Sibelius and Roussel), but received some tutelage from Hugh Allen, the cathedral organist. At Oxford Walton befriended two poets — Sacheverell Sitwell and Siegfried Sassoon — who would prove influential in publicizing his music. Little of Walton's juvenilia survives, but the choral anthem A Litany, written when he was just fifteen, exhibits striking harmonies and voice-leading which was more advanced than that of many older contemporary composers in Britain. Perhaps the most daring harmonic features of the work are the pungent augmented-chord inflections, notably in the striking final cadence.