Constant Lambert

Constant Lambert was the first English composer Diaghilev ever commissioned, built the musical side of British ballet, and drank himself into an early grave. He was twenty when Diaghilev asked him for Romeo and Juliet in 1926, which ended in a quarrel over the Surrealist designs. His own best music is The Rio Grande, a setting of Sacheverell Sitwell for piano, chorus and orchestra with jazz inflections that was a genuine popular success in 1929, and Summer's Last Will and Testament. Then he gave most of his working life to Ninette de Valois's company as conductor, musical director and adviser from 1931 - conducting hundreds of performances, arranging and orchestrating scores nobody else would touch, and insisting that a ballet company needed a real orchestra and real repertoire rather than piano reductions. He is a large part of why British ballet was taken seriously as music. He wrote Music Ho!, a book of criticism from 1934 that is still quoted and is very funny. He was a friend of Walton and of Anthony Powell, who put him into A Dance to the Music of Time as Moreland. He had diabetes, undiagnosed for years, and drank heavily against medical advice; he died at forty-five, two days before his forty-sixth birthday. He conducted the first British performances of several Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff works. His son Kit Lambert managed The Who and produced Tommy. He was in love with Margot Fonteyn for years, which was widely known in the company. He orchestrated and arranged the Meyerbeer score for Les Patineurs, which remains one of the most performed short ballets in the repertory.

• Lived: 1905 CE – 1951 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: artist