George Butterworth (1885—1916)

George Butterworth was the best-known of a generation of prominent musicians whose careers or lives were cut short by the hostilities of World War I. His reputation as a composer rests on a handful of exquisitely fashioned small-scale works which were strongly influenced by his studies in English folk song.

While at Trinity College, Butterworth encountered two musical greats, the seminal folk song collector and editor Cecil Sharp and the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. They encouraged his very evident musical abilities, and soon Butterworth was accompanying Vaughan Williams on folk song-collecting excursions into the English countryside.

Leaving Oxford for London, Butterworth threw himself into a welter of activity, studying for a short time at the Royal College of Music, teaching, writing music criticism for the Times, and composing. He was also active with the English Folk Song and Dance Society. His friendship with Vaughan Williams, meantime, had deepened both personally and professionally, and it was in the latter realm that Butterworth performed an invaluable service for the older composer when he helped reconstruct, from assembled orchestral parts, the full score of Vaughan Williams' A London Symphony, the autograph of which had been sent to conductor Fritz Busch in Dresden in 1914 and had been lost at the outbreak of war. Vaughan Williams afterward dedicated his symphonic masterpiece to Butterworth's memory.

George Butterworth's most famous work is his orchestral rhapsody A Shropshire Lad, inspired by A.E. Housman's poetry. Other works include Two English Idylls and The Banks of Green Willow for small orchestra. The slender catalog of Butterworth's music, in which a refined and elegiac sensibility is informed with the poignancy of English folk song, was reduced further when the composer, just before leaving England for the trenches in 1915, destroyed those manuscripts which he deemed unworthy of survival.

A Shropshire Lad Rhapsody

From 1911—12, Butterworth composed a series of songs for voice and piano, settings of poems from the collection entitled A Shropshire Lad (1896). Written by Alfred Edward Housman (1859—1936), A Shropshire Lad explores life in the face of the specter of impending mortality. Butterworth composed his orchestral A Shropshire Lad Rhapsody as an orchestral epilogue to his song settings of the various Housman poems. The work received its successful premiere at the Leeds Festival on October 2, 1913, with the distinguished conductor Arthur Nikisch leading the London Symphony Orchestra. 

The main theme is a meditation on one of Butterworth's most haunting songs, The Cherry Tree. Though scored for a large orchestra, it is mostly somber, quiet music, with a climax toward the end as the trumpets poignantly echo the song tune, after which the somber mood returns. The Rhapsody ends with funereal drumbeats that sound eerily prophetic: Butterworth was killed in the last year of the war, at age 31.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872—1958)

Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over nearly fifty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.

Vaughan Williams was born to a well-to-do family with strong moral views and a progressive social outlook. Throughout his life he sought to be of service to his fellow citizens, and believed in making music as available as possible to everybody. He wrote many works for amateur and student performance. He was musically a late developer, not finding his true voice until his late thirties; his studies in 1907–08 with the French composer Maurice Ravel helped him clarify the textures of his music and free it from Teutonic influences.

Vaughan Williams is among the best-known British symphonists, noted for his very wide range of moods, from stormy and impassioned to tranquil, from mysterious to exuberant. Among the most familiar of his other concert works are Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) and The Lark Ascending (1914). His vocal works include hymns, folk-song arrangements and large-scale choral pieces. He wrote eight works for stage performance between 1919 and 1951. Although none of his operas became popular repertoire pieces, his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930) was successful and has been frequently staged.

Two episodes made notably deep impressions in Vaughan Williams's personal life. The First World War, in which he served in the army, had a lasting emotional effect. Twenty years later, though in his sixties and devotedly married, he was reinvigorated by a love affair with a much younger woman, who later became his second wife. He went on composing through his seventies and eighties, producing his last symphony months before his death at the age of eighty-five. His works have continued to be a staple of the British concert repertoire, and all his major compositions and many of the minor ones have been recorded.

Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus

Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, was written for the New York World Fair in 1939, when Sir Adrian Boult conducted the first performance in Carnegie Hall. Vaughan Williams first encountered the folksong Dives and Lazarus in 1893, when he was 21, and he described its effect thus: “I had the sense of recognition—here’s something which I have known all my life, only I didn’t know it!”

Many of Vaughan Williams’s most famous compositions were direct settings of famous or newly discovered folk melodies. In the case of his Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, the inspiration was less literal.

As the composer himself explained, “These variants are not exact replicas of traditional tunes but rather reminiscences of various versions in my own collection and those of others.” The original tune in question, called Dives and Lazarus, is referenced in sixteenth-century writings but could well have been written earlier than that, and is a musical depiction of the New Testament story of the rich man and the beggar.

Much like The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, the Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus contains superbly sumptuous string writing, with sweeping melodies stretching across the orchestra, underpinned by deep and resonant harmonies.

A London Symphony

A London Symphony is the second symphony composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The work is sometimes referred to as Symphony No. 2, though the composer did not designate that name for the work. First performed in 1914, the original score of this four-movement symphony was lost and subsequently reconstructed. Vaughan Williams continued revisions of the work into its final definitive form, which was published in 1936.

It is dedicated to Vaughan Williams's friend and fellow composer George Butterworth.  It was Butterworth who had first encouraged Vaughan Williams to write a purely orchestral symphony. Vaughan Williams recorded that:

We were talking together one day when he said in his gruff, abrupt manner: “You know, you ought to write a symphony.” I answered that I'd never written a symphony and never intended to. I suppose Butterworth's words stung me and, anyhow, I looked out some sketches I had made for a symphonic poem about London and decided to throw it into symphonic form. From that moment, the idea of a symphony dominated my mind. I showed the sketches to George bit by bit as they were finished, and it was then that I realized that he possessed in common with very few composers a wonderful power of criticism of other men's work and insight into their ideas and motives. I can never feel too grateful to him for all he did for me over this work and his help did not stop short at criticism.

Of his own symphonies, Vaughn Williams said that this was probably his favorite. Written when he lived by the river at Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, it is packed with tunes and ideas full of visual references. The first movement evokes Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday and the second, Bloomsbury Square in November. The third conjures up Westminster Embankment and the Strand at night, while the fourth depicts the Thames passing, and along with it, London’s Edwardian glory days.