Orchestral Works by George Butterworth (review)

Abstract

COMPLETE ORCHESTRAL WORKS OF GEORGE BUTTERWORTH George Butterworth. Orchestral Works. Edited by Peter Ward Jones. London: Stainer and Bell, 2012. (Musica Britannica, 92.) [Pref. in Eng., Fr., Ger., p. xvii-xix; introd., p. xxi-xxxiv in Eng.; the sources, p. xxxv- xliii; editorial notes, p. xliv; acknowledgments, p. xlv; facsims., p. xlvi- xlix; score, p. 3-145; notes, p. 147; textual commentary, p. 148-49. Cloth. ISMN 979-0-2202-2325-9; ISBN 978-0-85249-924-5. £86.]Musica Britannica has in its ninety- second volume finally made it to the twenti- eth century. Admittedly, the two volumes surveying the song repertories of Hubert Parry (vol. 49, published 1982) and Charles Villiers Stanford (vol. 52, pub. 1986) con- tain 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 pub- lishers (quoted in Julian Rushton, Voice of Britain, 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 faith- ful editions, albeit nearly a century old and now freely downloadable. In this light it is difficult to see the present volume as neces- sary for much more than canonization, and it is curious to note that it was a rather late entry to the Musica Britannica rolls, judg- ing from the preceding volumes' lists of volumes in preparation.The significance of George Butterworth (1885-1916) in British music history is se- cured principally on the high esteem in which Ralph Vaughan Williams held him (long intending, indeed, that his own es- tate would benefit the Butterworth Trust; in the end, he opted to establish the RVW Trust, but he would certainly have been de- lighted 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 and never be old, to quote a memorable A. E. Housman line that Butterworth set in his Six Songs from Lad (1911). But was he in his glory at all? Did he ad- vance beyond just the first glimmers of early maturity? It is difficult to know, be- cause in an effort to set his house in order before going off to the trenches, he de- stroyed the manuscripts of many of his early works. whole of Butterworth's ex- tant orchestral oeuvre is represented by the four short works (plus a fragment) in- cluded 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 diffi- cult to say, and there is no indication that a future Butterworth volume is planned. This is a missed opportunity. Butterworth materials reside principally at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University; Peter Ward Jones, who spent a long career as music li- brarian there, is as knowledgeable as any- one on these sources. (Such a comprehen- sive 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 Land of Lost Content (a Housman reference), and subsequently Cherry Tree (as it borrows substantial motivic material from Butter- worth's setting of Housman's Loveliest of Trees). When it was published by Novello in 1917 the title page read SHROP- SHIRE LAD / RHAPSODY / FOR FULL ORCHESTRA and it has been generally known as simply A 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 pro- grammatic character and puts it in the company of generic titles qualified by a fill- in-the-blank nickname (as with Vaughan Williams's roughly contemporaneous A Sea Symphony and A London Symphony, and the later A Pastoral Symphony, all with the indefi- nite article in the title). …