PROGRAM NOTES: George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad

Posted on April 11, 2018

PYP will perform A Shropshire Lad on Sunday, May 6, 2018 in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Program notes written by Huw Edwards, Guest Conductor and PYP Music Director from 1995 to 2002.

Having attended the Royal College of Music in London as an organ scholar—where he assisted Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams with their research into English folk music—Butterworth returned to his native Northeast England.  A meticulous craftsman, Butterworth only produced a handful of works, including a song-cycle A Shropshire Lad—after the tragic, eerily-prophetic war poems by A.E. Housman—in 1912.  The following year Butterworth produced this ravishing and evocative “Rhapsody for Orchestra”, which utilizes several themes from his Housman songs, especially “Loveliest of Trees” and “Grief”. This ten-minute piece illustrates the influence of Sibelius, Debussy and Vaughan Williams—who dedicated his Second Symphony to the young Butterworth.

It is painfully ironic that Butterworth was drawn to Housman’s regret-filled poetry, as he enlisted in the Durham Light Infantry and was killed at the Somme in 1916 when only 31—shortly after being awarded the Medal of Courage.  Butterworth destroyed many of his manuscripts before going to the front and he predicted the unlikeliness of his return from the Great War.  At the close of A Shropshire Lad, Butterworth quotes a theme from one of his Housman settings, “With rue my heart is laden, for golden friends I had”, as if he knew this work would constitute his own epitaph.  As Kenneth Loveland remarks, “Nothing could be further from the agony of war than this music…it sings back to the tranquil landscape from which it grew.”