Classical Works:
Songs (6) from "A Shropshire Lad", for voice & piano (or orchestra)
- Date: 1911
- Main Performer: George Butterworth
- Genre: Vocal
Review
Though Butterworth's settings of 23 poems in A.E. Housman's collection entitled A Shropshire Lad were written several years before World War II, they poignantly mirror the futility of the 1914-1918 conflict: these "lads" represent the doomed youth of every war.Butterworth wrote two Shropshire Lad cycles (in 1911 and 1912), but only six of the finest songs are usually performed today. The opening five notes of the first, "Loveliest of trees," a somber meditation on mortality, became the central melodic motif in Butterworth's powerful orchestral Rhapsody based on the cycle. The remaining five are "When I was one-and-twenty," "Look not in my eyes," "Think no more, lad," "The lads in their hundreds" and "Is my team ploughing."
Butterworth was strongly influenced by the English folk song revival, but there is little trace of such elements here beyond the composer's attraction to Housman's metrically simple, deceptively artless texts. A Schubertian quality of tender lyricism and deeply personal sadness characterizes all these songs. The final one, "Is my team ploughing," is a tour-de-force -- a haunting dialogue between two men, one of whom has survived war and another, singing mezza voce, "who now lies under the land he used to plough."
Housman's words have been set to music by several English composers, though never more potently. The continuing popularity of Butterworth's set is due in some measure to the premonition it contains of the composer's own death in action on the Somme in 1916. An orchestral arrangement exists, but does not have the subtlety and delicacy of the original piano accompaniment. ~ All Music Guide
