George Butterworth - A Shropshire Lad, and Other Compositions

A Shropshire Lad, and Other Compositions

Butterworth did not write a great deal of music, and before and during the war he destroyed many works he did not care for, lest he should not return and have the chance to revise them. Of those that survive, his works based on A. E. Housman's collection of poems A Shropshire Lad are among the best known. Many English composers of Butterworth's time set Housman's poetry, including Ralph Vaughan Williams.

In 1911 and 1912, Butterworth wrote eleven settings of Housman's poems from "A Shropshire Lad". The poems are:

1. Loveliest of trees
2. When I was one and twenty
3. Look not in my eyes
4. Think no more, lad
5. The lads in their hundreds
6. Is my team ploughing?
7. Bredon Hill
8. Oh fair enough are sky and plain
9. When the lad for longing sighs
10. On the idle hill of summer
11. With rue my heart is laden

He used no known folk tunes in the songs, although one ("When I was one and twenty") was said to be based on a folk tune that has defied identification. The songs were dedicated to Victor Annesley Barrington-Kennett, a friend from Eton and Oxford, who was also to die in France in 1916. They were eventually published in two sets, "Six Songs from 'A Shropshire Lad'" (1-6 above) and "Bredon Hill and Other Songs" (7-11), although the composer never settled on a preferred order. Nine of the songs were first performed at a meeting of the Oxford University Musical Club, organised by Boult. The singer was J. Campbell McInnes, with the composer at the piano. Shortly thereafter Boult sang several of the songs at a private function. At this stage, Butterworth still had not completed "On the idle hill of summer" and did not do so until he was living at Cheyne Gardens in London. It is unusual for the songs to be given publicly in full, although each of the published sets is often performed separately and recorded regularly – in fact, they can be said to be among the most frequently performed English art songs. "Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad" is the more popular set, with "Is My Team Ploughing?" being the most famous song. Another, "Loveliest of Trees", is the basis for his 1912 orchestral rhapsody, also called A Shropshire Lad, which quotes two songs from the whole - "Loveliest of Trees" and "With Rue My Heart is Laden"'.

The parallel is regularly made between the often gloomy and death-obsessed subject matter of A Shropshire Lad, written in the shadow of the Second Boer War, and Butterworth's subsequent death during the Great War. In particular, the song "The lads in their hundreds" tells of young men who leave their homeland to 'die in their glory and never be old'.

The "Rhapsody, A Shropshire Lad" - a sort of postlude to the songs – employs a very large orchestra, and was first performed on 2 October 1913 at the Leeds Festival, conducted by Arthur Nikisch. It was influential upon Vaughan Williams (A Pastoral Symphony), Gerald Finzi (A Severn Rhapsody) and Ernest Moeran (First Rhapsody). Butterworth's other orchestral works are short and based on folksongs he had collected in Sussex in 1907, Two English Idylls (1911) and The Banks of Green Willow (1913). They are often performed and recorded, "Banks" particularly so. The latter work was premiered by the 24-year-old Adrian Boult on 27 February 1914, at West Kirby, Liverpool (this was in fact Boult's very first professional concert).

"Love Blows as the Wind Blows" is a setting of poems by W. E. Henley. It exists in three forms: for voice and string quartet, voice and piano and voice and small orchestra. The orchestral version differs from the others quite markedly, not least in having only three songs: "In the year that's come and gone", Life in her creaking shoes", and "On the way to Kew" (the other versions include "Fill a glass with golden wine"). The orchestral version was in fact the last music Butterworth worked on before leaving for France, and shows the composer's familiarity with Vaughan Williams's style, as well as with the music of Wagner, Elgar and Debussy.

It is thought by many that Butterworth showed real talent that might have flourished but for his early death. The "Two English Idylls" and "Banks" show an ability to handle folksong in a way that eluded many other composers – as the true building blocks of larger forms. His original music (especially the "Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad" and the orchestral song cycle "Love Blows As The Wind Blows") have a delicacy that brings to mind Claude Debussy or Jacques Ibert. However, there is reasonable evidence that he had put composition behind him by the time he went to France and it is by no means certain that he would have resumed it had he returned. It is certainly likely that he would have faced considerable pressure from friends to compose again, since his orchestral works (particularly the "Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad") had made a great impression, but he was a single-minded man who was unlikely to bow easily to such pressure. He remains perhaps the most obvious case of "what if...?" that is left to us from the battlefields of northern France, and he joins the Frenchman Albéric Magnard, the Spaniard Enrique Granados, and the German Rudi Stephan as possibly the greatest loss to music from the First World War.