Born 100 years ago this August, the composer Constant Lambert was many things during his brief life - he died aged 45 - but it was in the world of ballet that he enjoyed his greatest success. As musical director of the then Vic-Wells company in the 1930s and 1940s, Lambert composed or arranged the music for a whole canon of new ballets created by Frederick Ashton and Ninette de Valois. He took on the majority of the conducting and, during the war, even played the piano. He also acted as an unofficial tutor to members of the company, encouraging the young Margot Fonteyn - at the time his muse and mistress - to read Proust, and joining Ashton in a complete reading of the Bible.
In 1949, still with the (then renamed) Sadler's Wells Ballet, he conducted The Sleeping Princess, opening the company's pioneering North American tour. "He whipped people up into applause purely by sound; when nothing was really happening from a dancer, he seduced everyone into somehow imagining that she was divine," said New York City Ballet's Lincoln Kirstein.
A series of childhood illnesses left the young Constant deaf in one ear and lame enough to need a stick. Mocked by his music teacher and class when he asked to conduct the school orchestra, he went on to win a composition scholarship to the Royal College of Music. One of his teachers was Ralph Vaughan Williams, who remained an influence on Lambert's music, perhaps more than he would have cared to admit. Lambert loved the music of France and Russia, of Schumann, Liszt, Delius and Sibelius, but not the Austro-German tradition and their Wagnerian or Straussian successors. He was also gripped by ballet, theatre and jazz.
By the mid-1920s he was an intimate of the Sitwells, the composers William Walton, Peter Warlock and Bernard van Dieren, and the critic/composer Cecil Gray. With Walton and Edith Sitwell, he began a lifelong relationship with Facade, their "entertainment" for speaking voice and chamber ensemble. With Warlock he shared a love of limericks, cats, archaic musical terms, early music and drinking; Warlock (whose suicide in 1930 deeply upset Lambert) wondered whether literature rather than music was Lambert's "ultimate mode of expression".
However, in 1926, a time when Lambert was often hailed alongside Walton as the leading young British composer of the day, came an invitation to write a ballet for Diaghilev. The resulting Romeo and Juliet (a reworking of an earlier score) had a stormy production period in Monte Carlo worthy of the Powell/Pressburger film The Red Shoes. The impresario rejected Lambert's chosen designer in favour of the surrealists Max Ernst and Joan Miró. He also downgraded the composer's scenario to a ballet about the rehearsal of a ballet, rather than a setting of Shakespeare's play.
In 1928 the BBC gave the first performance of The Rio Grande, the jazzy choral cantata (words from a poem by Sacheverell Sitwell ) on which his reputation still rests. Lambert was to become tired of this score's ubiquitousness, wishing he could be honoured for the Concerto for Solo Piano and Nine Players, which he wrote in memory of Warlock, The Elegiac Blues or his most ambitious work, the cantata Summer's Last Will and Testament with words by the Elizabethan poet Thomas Nashe about living in the shadow of plague.
Summer's Last Will and Testament took three years to complete, a period in which he was busy with Sadler's Wells but still found time to conduct the London premiere of Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins (under the title Anna-Anna ) and to complete the book Music Ho!, a credo on art music in the 1920s and 1930s.
By the later 1930s Lambert's career as an original composer was largely over, although still to come were the ballets Horoscope (a vehicle for Fonteyn) and Tiresias (his last work, whose scenario about copulating snakes may have scared off a classical ballet audience in 1951), and the Aubade Heroique, recalling the occasion in 1940 when a ballet tour of the Netherlands was ended by the German invasion of that country. But his work for the music of others continued despite increasingly poor health brought on by alcoholism and overwork. He became associate conductor of the Proms, conducted over 50 broadcasts for the new Third Programme, made records for EMI and led the first postwar production of the new Covent Garden opera company, an arrangement by him and Edward Dent of Purcell's The Fairy Queen.
Lambert's exile painter father died while struggling to become a sculptor, although he was already feted as one of Australia's greatest portrait and war artists. Lambert's son Kit, having been the Who's manager, was overwhelmed by the excesses of the rock'n'roll lifestyle. Like theirs, Constant Lambert's achievements were often won at the expense of health. But his championing of sharp design and dramatic music in ballet remains a significant legacy to dance theatre.
· The Royal Ballet marks Constant Lambert's centenary June 15-18 in the Linbury Theatre, London WC2 (020-7304 4000). Merchant Seamen and The Rio Grande will be performed at the Proms July 15 to September 10 (020-7589 8212). Romeo and Juliet and Prize Fight are released on CD by Hyperion in August.