by Peter Parker
‘Is my team ploughing?’ has become something of a showpiece for singers because it requires them to use two voices: a quiet, ghostly one for the dead lad and a more hearty one for his living friend. This is the setting that particularly outraged Housman when he learned that Vaughan Williams had ‘mutilated’ the poem by cutting the second and third verses. ‘I wonder how would he like me to cut two bars out of his music,’ he grumbled. When told of Housman’s objection, Vaughan Williams tartly replied: ‘the composer has a perfect right artistically to set any portion of a poem he chooses provided he does not actually alter the sense […] I also feel that a poet should be grateful to any one who fails to perpetuate such lines as:
The goal stands up, the keeper
Stands up to keep the goal.’
Vaughan Williams also repeated the ‘Yes, lad’ in the first line of the final verse, a repetition that adds to the inappropriate hysteria of the entire setting. Ernest Newman, who was not an admirer of the cycle, found this song particularly unsatisfactory. Vaughan Williams, he wrote, ‘falsifies the very essence of the poem by exaggerating the contrast between the dead man and the living. He turns the poem into a sort of long-distance telephone conversation, in which one voice sounds very thin and the other aggressively robust. The two are never in the same focus, as Butterworth makes them, and as they undoubtedly ought to be.’ He felt that Vaughan Williams had gone for melodrama, when what was needed was pathos: ‘Dr. Vaughan Williams’s setting flies in the very face of all that is most delicate, most artistic, most human in the poem. What is the use of the poet softening the final blow as he does if Dr. Vaughan Williams is to deal it afresh at the dead man with a sledge-hammer?’ Newman even agreed with Housman that Vaughan Williams’s cutting of the text was damaging, because omitting the two verses ‘destroys the poet’s effect of the gradual, almost casual, transition from the ghost’s questions about the common things of life to the questions about his sweetheart’. Newman’s criticisms are harsh but not unfair, and Vaughan Williams’s setting of ‘Is my team ploughing’ justifies Housman’s frequent complaints that musical settings did violence to his poems.
On Wenlock Edge nevertheless did much to establish Vaughan Williams as a leading composer, and it rightly remains hugely popular, unlike his later version of the piece for tenor and orchestra, which he claimed to prefer, but which at the time of writing exists in only two recordings, whereas the original version is available in fifteen. The Housman settings also prepared the way for The Lark Ascending, one of the great works of twentieth-century English pastoral. It is not always remembered that this 1921 ‘Romance for violin and orchestra’, which frequently tops polls of the nation’s favourite piece of classical music, was not the composer’s first evocation of a lark soaring above the English countryside: he had already achieved this in his setting of ‘Bredon Hill’.
George Butterworth: England’s Loss
The two Housman song cycles composed by George Butterworth have been recorded almost as often as Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, and they receive many more live performances – partly because they require just a singer and a piano. Of all Housman settings, Butterworth’s remain perhaps the best loved. The reasons for this are not entirely musical, although their apparent folk-song-like simplicity and the sense that they are ‘purely’ English has endeared them to many audiences. As Vaughan Williams wrote of Butterworth: ‘he could no more help composing in his own national idiom than he could help speaking in his own mother tongue.’ Butterworth was himself one of those lads who would die in their glory and never grow old, and his death on the Somme in 1916 is generally acknowledged as the greatest loss that English music suffered in the First World War. In addition, Butterworth’s name would always be associated with Housman’s because, of the few completed works he left behind, three were derived from A Shropshire Lad: the two cycles, Six Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ and Bredon Hill and Other Songs, both composed between 1909 and 1911, and the orchestral rhapsody A Shropshire Lad, which received its premiere in 1913.
Born in London in 1885 into a wealthy middle-class family, Butterworth was brought up in York and educated at Eton. Although he had played the organ and written hymn tunes at his Yorkshire prep school, and had received musical tuition during the holidays, it was at Eton that he started writing music in earnest. He developed his talent further when he went up to Trinity College, Oxford, ostensibly to read Greats. He soon became involved in the musical life of the university, attending the many concerts on offer, performing on his own instrument, the piano, singing in choral works and doing some conducting: he would be elected president of the University Musical Club in his second year. It was while he was at Oxford that Butterworth was introduced to Vaughan Williams, who would become one of his closest friends. A lecture there by Cecil Sharp on the folk songs he had collected in Somerset, chaired by Lucy Broadwood, stimulated Butterworth’s own interest in folk music, and he joined the English Folk-Song Society in 1906 while still an undergraduate. In September of that year he travelled to Herefordshire with an Eton and Oxford contemporary three years his senior called Francis (‘Timmy’) Jekyll in order to collect his first folk songs in the picturesque village of Weobley, famed for its many timber-framed buildings. Timmy was the nephew of Gertrude Jekyll, doyenne of the English gardening style pioneered by William Robinson in The Wild Garden (1870), which had argued for a more natural and less formal style of gardening than the geometrical bedding schemes so popular during the Victorian period. Like her nephew, Gertrude Jekyll had been a collector, travelling widely in search of plants rather than songs. The plants she favoured were often selected and developed from species long familiar in the cottage gardens of the rural poor. The use to which she put these plants in her designs was a good deal more sophisticated than that of agricultural labourers, and her approach was not unlike that of composers who developed and adapted the folk songs they had collected in remote villages.
Sometimes accompanied by Timmy Jekyll, sometimes by Vaughan Williams or Sharp, but more often on his own, Butterworth would become a leading collector of folk songs and Morris tunes. In 1907 alone he noted down well over one hundred tunes and songs, not only from Herefordshire, but also from Sussex, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire, Buckinghamshire and Shropshire. Perhaps because he was devoting more time to his studies, he was slightly less assiduous in his collecting the following year, but nevertheless left Oxford that summer with only a third-class degree. This conveniently meant that a career in the law, towards which his father had hoped to steer him, was out of the question. He worked for a while as a music critic on The Times and contributed articles to Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, but in 1909 went to teach at a public school, Radley College in Oxfordshire, where he was valued as much for his sporting prowess as he was for founding the school’s choral society.
He left the job after a year to enrol at the Royal College of Music, where he studied the organ and the piano as well as harmony, counterpoint and composition. By this time he had written a Duo for Two Pianofortes: Rhapsody on English Folk Tunes, which was premiered at Eton in June 1910 but subsequently destroyed or lost. Butterworth may have found the RCM unsatisfactory, leaving after only a year, but it was during his time there that he wrote the Two English Idylls, which were based on folk songs he had collected in Sussex in the spring and summer of 1907, and which remain among his best-known works.
After leaving the RCM, Butterworth dedicated much of his time to the English Folk-Song Society. He not only continued to collect songs and tunes, publishing some of them in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society, but learned Morris dancing and gave numerous public demonstrations of the art as a member of the first men’s ‘side’ (or team) of the English Folk Dance Society. The society was founded in 1912, with Lady Mary Lygon (the unnamed subject of the thirteenth portrait in Elgar’s Enigma Variations) as its first president. Its aim was to promote traditional dance in much the same way as the English Folk-Song Society promoted traditional song. But
terworth spent April 1912 bicycling round Oxfordshire noting down the steps and tunes of Morris dances from the old people he met in pubs or visited at their cottages or in the workhouse, and he would collaborate with Sharp on several publications about traditional dance. Thanks to the many demonstrations undertaken by Butterworth and others, Morris dancing ceased to be regarded as ‘a pastime for cranks’, and became absorbed into mainstream culture; it featured for example in the Oxford University Dramatic Society’s production of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday in 1913, where the audience demanded encores from the dancers, and in Harley Granville-Barker’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Savoy Theatre in 1914, where folk tunes ousted Mendelssohn’s incidental music.
Alongside his musicological work, Butterworth was working on his own closely allied compositions. Chief of these was his Folk Songs from Sussex, arrangements for voice and piano of eleven songs he and Jekyll had collected during their travels in that county, which were published in 1912. ‘It has often been my privilege to hear him improvise harmonies to the folk-tunes which he had collected,’ Vaughan Williams wrote, ‘bringing out in them a beauty and character which I had not realised when simply looking at them. This was not merely a case of “clever harmonisation”; it meant that the inspiration which led to the original inception of these melodies and that which lay at the root of George’s art were one and the same, and that in harmonising folk-tunes or using them in his compositions, he was simply carrying out a process of evolution of which these primitive melodies and his own art are different stages.’
These folk-song arrangements were made between 1906 and 1909, and may in some way be seen as preparing the ground for the two Shropshire Lad cycles that Butterworth began working on in the latter year – although he had composed a setting of ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ as early as June 1905, when he was himself still nineteen but already felt that he could improve on Somervell’s version. Butterworth owned a copy of the 32mo edition of Housman’s book, which would have been handy to slip into a pocket when he went on his walking tours to collect folk music.
The pencilled notes that Butterworth made in this copy suggest that at one point he envisaged a narrative cycle of fourteen songs, beginning with ‘Reveille’ and its command to wake in the early morning and get out into the countryside. This would have been followed by a new setting of ‘When I was one-and-twenty’, establishing both the age and mood of the protagonist, whose lovelorn unhappiness would be further emphasised in ‘When the lad for longing sighs’, with thoughts of suicide being provided by ‘Oh fair enough are sky and plain’ and the other Narcissus poem, ‘Look not in my eyes, for fear’. The mood shifts in the next proposed setting, ‘Think no more, lad’, advice which apparently leads the protagonist, in ‘The Recruit’, to enlist – though this decision may not be entirely a happy one, since the next poem is ‘Into my heart an air that kills’. This is followed by ‘Is my team ploughing?’, suggesting that the protagonist has died, and it has been argued that for the remaining poems in Butterworth’s proposed sequence, ‘the emphasis shifts to his friend left behind’. He perhaps recalls ‘The lads in their hundreds’, amongst whom his friend, one of the ‘lightfoot lads’ in ‘With rue my heart is laden’, was numbered, since these are the next two settings. These are followed by the other ploughboy poem, ‘When smoke stood up from Ludlow’, with its own intimations of mortality, and the sequence would end with ‘The New Mistress’ and ‘On the idle hill of summer’.
Like the proposed narrative of Somervell’s cycle, this one doesn’t entirely work, not least because the last two poems suggest entirely different reasons for enlisting: in the first the lad determines to join the colours after an argument with his lover, who rejects him; in the second he is attracted by the romance of soldiers marching while he lies dreaming on a hillside. It seems likely that the difficulty of creating such a narrative was the reason Butterworth abandoned this scheme and instead, after further sifting during which he added and rejected poems, eventually composed two groups of songs that are related merely by mood. Nine of the songs, which had not at that point been allocated to their two groupings, were performed at Oxford’s University Musical Club in May 1911, sung by the baritone J. Campbell McInnes, with Butterworth himself at the piano.
It is perhaps unsurprising that of all the settings of Housman’s words, Butterworth’s are most closely allied to folk song. The tune he eventually used for ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ is marked on the score ‘Traditional’, but the apparently simple and pared-down quality of his music throughout his two cycles recalls the kind of tunes he had himself collected. The folk-song element also takes his songs away from the drawing-room ballad style of Balfour Gardiner, Graham Peel and the less successful settings of Somervell. It might even be said that Butterworth takes A Shropshire Lad out of the drawing room altogether and back into the open air where it belongs. It is not, however, that Butterworth is striding out across the English countryside with boy-scout heartiness: instead there is a sense that he, like Housman’s Lad, is accompanied on his walks by ‘the beautiful and death-struck year’. This is not because we know that Butterworth was as doomed as the Shropshire lads of his source material – he could not, after all, have foreseen his fate when he wrote the songs; rather, it is that he more than any other composer captures Housman’s particular sensibility.
Some of what people who knew Butterworth have written about him suggests he may have shared aspects of Housman’s temperament. Outwardly, he was a rather hearty figure, usually seen with a pipe in his mouth, every inch the straightforward product of public school and Oxford. Although he had something of the traditional Yorkshireman’s habit of plain speaking, he was in other ways reticent: ‘reserved’ was often used to describe his manner. His friend R.O. Morris, a musician who would become a professor at the RCM, wrote: ‘Under a somewhat gruff and imperturbable exterior there lay an ironic and fastidious temperament that could only be satisfied with the best, and directed upon itself a criticism far more searching than it would ever level at another.’ It was for this reason that Butterworth went through all his compositions before going to France, destroying any that did not satisfy him. Morris continued: ‘Only those who knew him intimately could guess at the searchings of the heart, the struggles and developments and reaction, that were taking place under that outward serenity.’ There has also been speculation about Butterworth’s sexuality, with no conclusive evidence one way or the other. He was thirty-one when he died but no women outside his family seem to have featured significantly in his life, his friendships being almost entirely with men; this would not, however, have seemed particularly unusual or ‘suspicious’ at the period. Was he simply a man’s man, hiding nothing at all behind that thick moustache, or did he, like Housman, have some secret sorrow that fed into his work? The pianist Graham Johnson, who has often performed settings of A Shropshire Lad, has written that the homosexual subtext of Housman’s book during the author’s lifetime ‘seems only to have struck those who were “in the know” – Butterworth among composers, for example, but seemingly not Vaughan Williams’. The strain of melancholy in Butterworth’s music certainly seems at odds with the rather bluff figure that emerges from recollections of the composer, and it is telling that Butterworth thought Somervell’s Housman settings ‘much too flippant for the words’.
Butterworth had been at the annual Stratford-upon-Avon Summer School of Folk Songs and Folk Dance when war was declared. Stratford had become a locus of Englishness, ‘a quiet little heaven where it was always May, with the nightingales shaking silver in the dark trees at night’, in the memory of the travel writer H.V. Morton, and precisely the kind of place you might expect to find people being taught traditional folk dance. It was not simply that Stratford was the birthplace of England’s national writer, but it was where the actor-manager Frank Benson held his annual Shakespeare Festival, of which Vaughan Williams was musical director. Morton continued:
I remember [Benson] w
aving his arms at me in a storeroom hung with hams that he used as an office, and telling me, as I sat worshipping him from a sugar crate, that only through Stratford, the common meeting-place of the English-speaking world, could we heal the pains of Industrialism and make England happy again. We were to make the whole world happy, apparently, by teaching it to morris-dance and to sing folk-songs and to go to the Memorial Theatre. With the splendid faith of Youth we pilgrims believed that England could be made ‘merrie’ again by hand-looms and young women in Liberty gowns who played the harpsichord. Then, I seem to remember, shortly after that war was declared.
Butterworth enlisted on 1 September and was shot dead by a sniper in the early hours of 5 August 1916, a war hero whose men had named a communication trench after him, and who had been mentioned in dispatches and twice recommended for the Military Cross all within the same month. The second recommendation resulted in the award of the medal on the night he died. He was buried where he fell, but his grave was subsequently lost and his name inscribed instead on the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval.