by Peter Parker
Butterworth’s apparent affinity with Housman’s poetry makes his settings the most poignant of them all. Even ‘Think no more, lad’ recognises in the music of the second verse (as Somervell, for example, does not) that the reason the lad is being encouraged to drink is in order to forget his mortality. That mortality is evident from the very opening of Butterworth’s first cycle, the descending notes on the piano in ‘Loveliest of trees’ suggesting that the cherry’s beauty is evanescent and its blossom will inevitably fall. Descending chords are similarly used to accompany the voice of the dead lad in the last song of the cycle, ‘Is my team ploughing?’ Whereas the final verse of Vaughan Williams’s setting, in which the friend admits his betrayal, verges on the hysterical, in Butterworth’s setting it is merely desperately sad, with the falling chords that represent the dead ploughboy played once more on the piano after the singer has sung his last phrase, ‘Never ask me whose’. In between these two songs are a properly rueful ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ and a sorrowing ‘Look not in my eyes’; the aforementioned ‘Think no more, lad’; and the most moving of all settings of ‘The lads in their hundreds’, the gently rocking piano accompaniment of which continues for several bars after the final words – as effective in its less emphatic way as Somervell’s repeat of the final line. ‘Is my team ploughing?’ provides a perfect end to the sequence, as Butterworth must have realised after hearing the song performed: he originally ended the cycle with ‘Think no more, lad’, but changed his mind when he came to publish the work.
Butterworth’s Six Songs, which received their premiere at the Aeolian Hall in June 1911, sung by Campbell McInnes with Hamilton Harty at the piano, are less about creating drama than about evoking a mood of loss and regret, and although they are sometimes performed and often recorded with Bredon Hill, it is this first cycle that steals into the heart in the way Housman’s best poems do. Bredon Hill nevertheless shares the earlier cycle’s sense of romantic apprehension, of a beautiful but haunted English landscape in which the almost imperceptible passing of time will bring unwelcome change. Butterworth never set ‘Into my heart an air that kills’, but all his songs suggest a land of lost content. Particularly effective in the second cycle are the two hilltop poems: ‘Bredon Hill’, with its mere suggestion of the pealing and tolling of bells; and ‘On the idle hill of summer’, in which the music, evocative of a drowsy afternoon in the English countryside, persists unchanged through the third verse describing the dead lying abandoned on the battlefields, a device that implies that (as Housman would put it) nature, heartless, witless nature, is indeed indifferent to the fate of men and neither cares nor knows.
Butterworth’s other work derived from A Shropshire Lad was his ‘Orchestral Rhapsody’ of that title, which received its premiere at the Leeds Music Festival on 2 October 1913 and which he described as ‘in the nature of an orchestral epilogue’ to his two song cycles. Butterworth had originally called the composition an ‘Orchestral Prelude’ and given it the title The Land of Lost Content, which he subsequently changed to The Cherry Tree, chiefly because its main theme was derived from his setting of ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ – although it also, to touching effect, quotes the first line of his setting of ‘With rue my heart is laden’ on a solo flute just as the piece dies away. In a letter to Herbert Thompson, the music critic of the Yorkshire Post who was writing programme notes for the concert, Butterworth explained that ‘the title has no other significance, & has no more concern with the cherry trees than with beetles (I wish I could suggest a better one). If it has any “meaning” at all, it is more in the nature of a meditation of the exiled Shropshire Lad […] Please explain that it is not a description of orchards – I’m sorry to be so misleading.’ After toying with other titles, Butterworth decided on ‘A “Shropshire Lad” Rhapsody, for Full Orchestra’, adding: ‘be careful of the inverted commas’ – advice that was ignored when the piece was published the following year as A Shropshire Lad: Rhapsody for Full Orchestra. Ever since there has been some confusion as to the correct name of the work, which has been performed and recorded under several variations of this title.
The piece attracted widespread praise, E.J. Dent stating that Butterworth now stood beside Vaughan Williams, whom he had hitherto regarded as ‘our one really great composer’. It rapidly became part of the concert repertoire and in March 1914 was heard alongside Butterworth’s lively third folk-song idyll, The Banks of Green Willow, at the latter work’s London premiere. These orchestral works established Butterworth as one of the leading English pastoralists, and the Rhapsody in particular was a regular feature in concert programmes during the latter years of the war and immediately after it, played in memory of its composer and more widely as a lament for the almost prelapsarian England that existed before the cataclysm.
There were other losses to music in the war, including Ernest Farrar and Willie B. Manson. Farrar had taught both Frank Bridge and Gerald Finzi at the Royal College of Music, and was killed in September 1918 at the age of thirty-three, having spent only two days in action. Like Butterworth, he was careful to destroy any compositions that did not satisfy him before setting off for the front, but among pieces that survive are his Three Part Songs for mixed chorus, setting ‘Oh when I was in love with you’, ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ and ‘Think no more, lad; laugh, be jolly’, and his three-movement orchestral suite, English Pastoral Impressions. The first movement of the suite, ‘Spring Morning’, quotes ‘Sumer is icumen in’ and introduces bells; these prepare the way for the second movement, which is titled ‘Bredon Hill’. This movement does not follow the poem but reflects its mood in the manner of Vaughan Williams (to whom the suite is dedicated), with an evocation of a still summer’s afternoon, distantly pealing bells, and a lark soaring on a solo violin. It has been suggested that the third movement, ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’, may also owe something to Housman, its drums and a horn imitating a bugle call inspired by ‘On the idle hill of summer’. These, however, introduce a lively folk tune on the woodwind that seems distinctly unmilitary, nearer in mood to The Banks of Green Willow than to Butterworth’s Rhapsody.
Manson, who had been born in New Zealand, studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music, where he won several prizes and was appointed a sub-professor of harmony and composition. His Three Poems from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (‘Think no more, lad’, ‘When I came last to Ludlow’ and ‘Loveliest of Trees’) were written around 1915, when he was eighteen or nineteen, but not published until 1920. He enlisted as a private in the London Scottish Regiment in January 1916 and was killed six months later on the first day on the Somme, which was also his twentieth birthday. His body was never found and his name joined Butterworth’s on the Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval.
E.J. Moeran, who as a keen motorcyclist had enlisted as a dispatch rider, was rather luckier, though the head wound he received in 1917 necessitated the insertion of a metal plate in his skull and was the cause – some said – of his unstable behaviour during the remainder of his life. He composed Four Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ after joining up but before he had been sent to the front, and the manuscript is inscribed ‘Midsummer 1916’; the four songs are ‘Westward on the high-hilled plains’, ‘On the Road to Ludlow’ (setting ‘When last I came to Ludlow’), ‘This time of year a twelvemonth past’ and ‘Far in a western brookland’. Moeran had composed only one song before this collection, and would go on to set other poets, but he often came back to Housman.
The war period produced one other Housman song cycle, H.S. Goodhart-Rendel’s mis-titled Four Songs from ‘The Shropshire Lad’ (1917), and a handful of individual songs, most notably Janet Hamilton’s ‘By Wenlock Town’ and ‘With rue my heart is laden’, the first of which became the best known of her four settings of Housman’s poems because it was recorded by Gervase Elwes; Ivor Gurney’s ‘On Wenlock Edge’ (1917), which has more or less vanished from the repertoire, and ‘The Cherry Tree’ (1918), which he later revised as ‘Lovelies
t of trees’, the second song in his cycle The Western Playland; and John Ireland’s first Housman setting, the last three stanzas of ‘March’, published under the title ‘The Heart’s Desire’ (1917).
Interlude
1918: A Shropshire Lad Spat
Up until 1918 thirty-three of the sixty-three poems in A Shropshire Lad had been set to music, the most popular choices being ‘When I was one-and-twenty’, ‘Think no more, lad; laugh, be jolly’, ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry’ and ‘Bredon Hill’. These would remain among the most frequently set of the poems, but not everyone approved of composers’ efforts to capture Housman’s words in music. It was during the last year of the war that this became the focus of a public spat between Ernest Newman and Edwin Evans about the Englishness of English music.
The championing of English music had gathered momentum in the years leading up to the outbreak of war. The Society of British Composers had been founded in 1905 to promote and organise publication and performances of British music, and although it would not survive the war, being wound up in 1918, a series of concerts arranged by Balfour Gardiner at the Queen’s Hall between March 1912 and March 1913 did much to gain English music a proper audience. The programmes were packed with works by Holst, Vaughan Williams, Parry, Arnold Bax, Granville Bantock, Roger Quilter and Cyril Scott, and according to Percy Grainger ‘altered the way the composers thought about themselves and the way the musical public thought about English music’. On one occasion, E.J. Moeran, unable to get a ticket for a performance of a Bach Passion in St Paul’s Cathedral, went instead, and without great enthusiasm, to a Queen’s Hall concert of contemporary British music. Having unexpectedly enjoyed it, he attended other similar concerts, hearing at one Vaughan Williams’s Norfolk Rhapsody, which seemed to him ‘to breathe the very spirit of the English countryside’. This in turn prompted him to buy Cecil Sharp’s Folk Songs from Somerset and embark on his own search for folk songs in his native Norfolk.
The whole issue of nationality and music had become more acute when Britain found itself at war with Germany. There was an ill-advised move to outlaw modern German and Austrian music, but although planned performances of Wagner and Richard Strauss at the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts were cancelled in August 1914, it was quickly realised that musical life in Britain would simply grind to a halt if this policy were pursued. A good deal of patriotic music was written to order during the war. Elgar’s Carillon for orchestra and reciter, with words by the Belgian poet Émile Cammaerts about the German invasion of his country, was first performed in London in December 1914 and then toured the country, proving very popular. His more substantial The Spirit of England set words by Laurence Binyon, including ‘For the Fallen’, for orchestra, soprano and tenor soloists and chorus. It was first performed in its entirety in October 1917, although two of the three settings were premiered the year before. Parry’s The Chivalry of the Sea for orchestra and mixed chorus, setting words by the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, was written for a concert given in December 1916 to commemorate the Battle of Jutland. His setting of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, which rapidly became another alternative national anthem, had been written earlier that same year for the Fight for Right Movement at the request of Bridges, and was intended to promote morale on the home front. Bridges had suggested that if Parry were unavailable, Butterworth should be approached, which would no doubt have resulted in something very different indeed. Like Butterworth, a large number of the younger composers were otherwise occupied on various fronts, and what music they managed to write while on active service was mostly performed and published after the war had ended.
It was against this backdrop that Newman and Evans had their exchange of views about the setting of English poetry with particular reference to A Shropshire Lad. Before the war, Newman had famously argued that there was no such thing as ‘national’ music and had entered a debate on the subject with Cecil Sharp in the English Review in 1912. This, however, was not the same as saying that there was no such thing as ‘English’ music, or indeed ‘English’ poetry, of which Newman thought A Shropshire Lad a pre-eminent example. ‘Surprise was recently expressed in another quarter,’ he wrote in his 1918 article,
that I – I of all people – should be either so impudent or so illogical as to speak of any music or poetry being ‘English’, after my horrible record in the matter of the ‘nationalist’ theory. The surprise could not have been greater or more pained had the late Dr. Crippen, after his domestic experiments with poison, burst into song on the subject of the happiness of married life. I am sure there is nothing consciously impudent in my speaking of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ being English, and asking for an English musical setting of it; and I hope there is nothing illogical in my doing so.
Newman felt that his critics had failed to differentiate between ‘English’ music and ‘national’ music: ‘A “national” movement in art or literature is never a national movement in the sense that it either emanates from the whole nation or appeals to the whole nation. It emanates from a number of people of a certain way of thinking, who concentrate on this, for a time, to the exclusion of other ways of thinking which, though of no particular interest to them, are of the greatest interest to other people of the same nationality.’
He went on to insist that Housman’s poems were ‘English’ rather than ‘national’: ‘These poems are English, in the sense that only in England, perhaps only in Shropshire, would a lad look out upon the world with such eyes, and find such words in which to express himself; but the poems are not national, because English people of other heredities and in other environments would see life from quite another angle, and express what they saw in quite other ways.’
Newman maintained that very little ‘great English art’ had been made out of the musical settings of A Shropshire Lad. In particular, he felt that Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge had been absurdly overpraised. Evans disagreed – as indeed he disagreed with everything Newman wrote about what constituted English music – feeling that it was not merely in language that Housman and Vaughan Williams were ‘English’. The ‘sentiment’ shown in both the poems and the music also reflected the nation:
it varies, of course, from one poem to the next. But there are pervading characteristics, notably a certain ingenuousness that is in harmony with our national character, and a melancholy, devoid of weakness, such as one can associate with a climate which, though conducive to depression, has helped to mould a robust race by developing its powers of resistance. There is, in fact, something paradoxical, and not to be found elsewhere, in our ability to use the greyest of tints without making them an expression of weakness. The ingenuousness referred to […] is the quality most admired by those foreigners who really understand us, but no foreigner could express it. The critical realism of the Latins, and the crocodile sentiment of the Germans, stand equally in the way. It takes an Englishman to express it without either the excessive, hollow sentimentality of the German or the latent scepticism of the Latin.
This kind of chauvinism is perhaps understandable, expressed as it was while the country was at war. Evans was, however, making a musical point too. Part of Vaughan Williams’s success was that the ‘musical sentiment’ of On Wenlock Edge was ‘as sincere and as unsophisticated as that of the poems themselves. Nowhere is it marred by the self-indulgence of excess, and nowhere does it show signs of being studied or self-conscious. It is fresh and spontaneous and therefore convincing. Wherein it resides is a psychological rather than a technical question, and it would be a sin to dissect it. It expresses, as it were, in the colouring of his own climate, the clean faith of the healthy young Englishman.’
Spontaneity and artlessness, untainted by Continental self-indulgence and self-consciousness, were the true marks of the English character – and we are not that far away from Hazlitt’s dissection of that character in his ‘Merry England’ article published almost exactly a century before. Not that Evans is entirely against foreign exuberance (particularly amon
g Britain’s allies), and he goes on to characterise contemporary music much as Housman would define poetry in his Leslie Stephen Lecture some fifteen years later:
There is in modern music much that makes its emotional appeal more directly through the senses, and less through the intelligence, than was the rule when the great rhetorical forms of the sonata and the symphony were at their zenith. Perhaps the most complete illustration of this is furnished by the introduction to the second tableau of Stravinsky’s ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’. Contrary to academic opinion this is not a lapse from high estate, but a return to the natural functions of music, and a reassertion of its independence, which had become compromised by purely intellectual considerations […] Although not in the direct stream of this tendency, ‘On Wenlock Edge’ derives some of its power from a similarly direct appeal that, for want of a better word, one may designate as physical.
In other words, Vaughan Williams’s music makes the same direct appeal that Housman’s poetry does.
Ivor Gurney: Composing for England
It was not only Edwin Evans who thought On Wenlock Edge a fine example of the Englishness of English music. Ivor Gurney went to a performance of the piece in May 1920 and afterwards wrote on his programme: ‘Purely English words retranslated and reinforced by almost purely English music – the product of a great mind not always working at the full of its power, but there continually and clearly apparent. The French mannerisms must be forgotten in the strong Englishness of the prevailing mood – in the unmistakable spirit of the time of creation. England is the spring of emotion, the centre of power, and the pictures of her, the breath of her earth and growing things are continually felt through the lovely sound.’