Crown Imperial (march)

Crown Imperial is an orchestral march by William Walton, commissioned for the coronation of King George VI in Westminster Abbey in 1937.

[6] The title may have been drawn from William Dunbar's poem "In Honour of the City of London", which Walton set as a cantata of the same name in 1937; it included the line ‘In beawtie beryng the crone imperial".

Walton put those words as a superscription at the head of the march,[5] but he said the inspiration for his title was a speech in Shakespeare's Henry V: I am a king that find thee, and I know 'Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball, The sword, the mace, the crown imperial, The intertissued robe of gold and pearl, The farced title running 'fore the king, The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp That beats upon the high shore of this world, No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave.

The following trio section, in A-flat major, is a broad cantabile Elgarian theme introduced by clarinets, cor anglais and violas with the other strings providing the accompaniment.

A reviewer in The Musical Times called it "frankly a pastiche on a well-known model of ternary pomp and circumstance, with the regulation strut and swagger, plenty of plain diatonics, and a nobilmente tune in the middle".

There is also a vocal adaptation by Arthur Sandford with words by Doris Arnold "That we may never fail" (1948), commissioned by the BBC for a gala variety concert in honour of the silver wedding of George VI and his wife.

[17] Crown Imperial was performed as a recessional piece at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton on 29 April 2011,[18] and was among the music played in Westminster Abbey before the service for the coronation of King Charles III in May 2023.