Orchestral Works by George Butterworth (review)

Musica Britannica has in its ninety-second volume finally made it to the twentieth century. Admittedly, the two volumes surveying the song repertories of Hubert Parry (vol. 49, published 1982) and Charles Villiers Stanford (vol. 52, pub. 1986) contain a few numbers composed after 1900, but with the present volume there is a clear departure from the early explicit intent to publish British music from “earlier than the twentieth century which has not been made available to the public by commercial publishers” (quoted in Julian Rushton, “Voice of Britain,” The Musical Times 136, no. 1831 [September 1995]: 472). This edition would not pass that standard: the music is too recent, and—thanks to the efforts of the composer’s father—almost all already published posthumously in generally faithful editions, albeit nearly a century old and now freely downloadable. In this light it is difficult to see the present volume as necessary for much more than canonization, and it is curious to note that it was a rather late entry to the Musica Britannica rolls, judging from the preceding volumes’ lists of volumes in preparation.

The significance of George Butterworth (1885–1916) in British music history is secured principally on the high esteem in which Ralph Vaughan Williams held him (long intending, indeed, that his own estate would benefit the Butterworth Trust; in the end, he opted to establish the RVW Trust, but he would certainly have been delighted that it in turn has subsidized the production of this Butterworth volume).Augmenting this was his poignant fate to be cut down in battle—and so to become one of “The lads that will die in their glory and never be old,” to quote a memorable A. E. Housman line that Butterworth set in his Six Songs from “A Shropshire Lad” (1911). But was he in his “glory” at all? Did he advance beyond just the first glimmers of early maturity? It is difficult to know, because in an effort to set his house in order before going off to the trenches, he destroyed the manuscripts of many of his early works. The whole of Butterworth’s extant orchestral oeuvre is represented by the four short works (plus a fragment) included in this volume. Why it was not made twice its size, to encompass the balance of his Nachlass (songs, a few choral pieces, and a single string quartet—and all dating from the last seven years of his short life) is difficult to say, and there is no indication that a future Butterworth volume is planned. This is a missed opportunity. The Butterworth materials reside principally at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University; Peter Ward Jones, who spent a long career as music librarian there, is as knowledgeable as anyone on these sources. (Such a comprehensive volume would not have been the first for Musica Britannica: volume 8 presented the complete surviving works of John Dunstable.)

The most frequently performed among the four complete orchestral works is his single work for large orchestra, the title of which evidently gave the composer some trouble. At first (1911) it was The Land of Lost Content (a Housman reference), and subsequently The Cherry Tree (as it borrows substantial motivic material from Butterworth’s setting of Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees”). When it was published by Novello in 1917 the title page read “A SHROPSHIRE LAD / RHAPSODY / FOR FULL ORCHESTRA” and it has been generally known as simply A Shropshire Lad. Musica Britannica opts for the version ultimately preferred by the composer, the slightly but significantly different A “Shropshire Lad” Rhapsody, a title which diminishes the programmatic character and puts it in the company of generic titles qualified by...