The visionary Butterworth

The sounds of A Shropshire

Lad aren’t the genteel eddies of an English backwater

Tom Service explores the emotional power and striking modernness of one of English music’s greatest tone poems, Butterworth’s searing A Shropshire Lad

It’s a piece that defines the very stuff of pastoral nostalgia, which, for many, is what Englishness in music all about: George Butterworth’s orchestral rhapsody, A Shropshire Lad.

But I want to argue for a different dimension to this music. Because

A Shropshire Lad isn’t a footnote of sentimental whimsy from the lost generation of creative talents who died in the First World War trenches. In its time and place, this devastatingly powerful rhapsody is a realisation of a unique and profoundly modern musical vision.

Butterworth died at the Somme in 1916 at the age of 31, and his output is shrouded in sepia tones of pity for his fate, as if his music were composed in the certain knowledge of his tragic, youthful demise.

But it wasn’t: Butterworth was one of the brightest talents of new music in England, and the musical and expressive substance of A Shropshire Lad shows how he’s part of a modern European musical mainstream. A Shropshire

Lad was written in 1912, based on the melody of songs Butterworth had already written on AE Housman’s poems, and it was premiered at the

Leeds Festival the following year. So far, so thoroughly English; yet the piece was conducted by Arthur Nikisch on 2 October 1913. Nikisch was the embodiment of the Central European tradition, and was then in charge of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestras.

And in transforming a song-cycle into a symphonic poem, Butterworth is doing what Mahler had done in previous decades; in his researches into the folk cultures of his country, as a founding member of the Folk Dance and Song Society (you can see him dancing ‘Molly Oxford’ and ‘Hey boys, up go we’ in film recorded in 1912), Butterworth was embarked on a similar project of renewing national musical traditions that Janá ek, Bartók and Kodály were up to in Eastern Europe.

I’m not saying that Janá ek or Mahler are direct influences on Butterworth – far from it. But what’s he’s doing – technically, expressively, culturally – belongs in a modern mainstream of pre-war music. The sounds A Shropshire

Lad makes aren’t the genteel eddies of an English backwater. Butterworth maps a journey that’s despairingly introverted, turning the logic of the symphonic poem inside out. Instead of grand dramatic statement, like Richard Strauss, or colouristic kaleidoscope, like Debussy or Ravel, A Shropshire Lad builds towards climaxes of feeling that plunge inward, creating gyres of orchestral tension from its achingly unforgettable tunes, whose emotional darkness is never fully exorcised, until we’re left suspended in the tragic desolation of the music’s final pages. It’s a fearless vision of searing melancholy that is Butterworth’s own, and there’s nothing like it in anyone else’s music – in England, or anywhere else; from 1912, or any other time.

Tom Service explores how music works in The Listening Service on Sundays at 5pm