1885–1916 · United Kingdom · 20th century
George Butterworth (1885-1916) was an English composer. His name is linked above all with the orchestral idyll The Banks of Green Willow and with songs he set to A. E. Housman's verses from A Shropshire Lad. He gathered folk songs and fell on the Somme in the First World War.
The future composer's birthplace was Paddington, in London, and the date was 12 July 1885. His father, Sir Alexander Kaye Butterworth, soon became general manager of the North Eastern Railway, based in York, so the family relocated there. Their York home was Riseholme, on Driffield Terrace; the building was later absorbed into the Mount School.
Music came to him first through his mother, who sang, and he was writing pieces very young. At Aysgarth School, where he prepared for secondary school, the boy accompanied chapel services on the organ. A scholarship took him on to Eton, where an orchestral barcarolle of his was performed. That score has been missing for a very long time.
A blue plaque honouring him was unveiled at College House, which belongs to the Mount School, in 2016, one hundred years after his death. The biographer Anthony Murphy did the unveiling for the York Civic Trust.
His next stop was Trinity College, Oxford. Music took up more of his attention there, and he served as president of the University Music Club. His circle included the folk song collector Cecil Sharp, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, Hugh Allen, who would later direct the Royal College of Music, and the baritone and later conductor Adrian Boult.
Vaughan Williams became one of his closest friends. Butterworth was the one who urged him to reshape a symphonic poem in progress into what became the London Symphony. Just before the war the score went missing on its way to Germany, and Butterworth joined Geoffrey Toye and the critic Edward J. Dent in helping to rebuild it. Vaughan Williams later dedicated the symphony to Butterworth's memory.
Butterworth and Vaughan Williams went out into the countryside more than once to note down folk songs. Butterworth's own tally passed 450, a good many gathered in Sussex in 1907, at times with a phonograph. What the two men heard left a strong mark on what they went on to compose.
Folk dancing was another passion, and he was especially drawn to morris dancing. The English Folk Dance and Song Society, which he helped found in 1906, paid him for a time as a professional morris dancer, and he danced in its Demonstration Team.
Once Oxford was behind him, he set up as a musician. He reviewed concerts for The Times, wrote his own music and taught at Radley College, in Oxfordshire. He also spent a short spell at the Royal College of Music studying piano and organ, with Hubert Parry among his teachers.
Academic life did not suit him, and he left within a year.
When war broke out, he enlisted as a private in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry alongside friends such as Geoffrey Toye and R. O. Morris. Before long he took a commission as second lieutenant in the 13th Durham Light Infantry, and he was later made lieutenant for a time. The army knew him as G. S. Kaye-Butterworth. He wrote warmly in his letters about the County Durham miners in his platoon.
The 13th battalion belonged to the 23rd Division, which was ordered to take the ground west of Contalmaison, a village on the Somme. On 16 and 17 July 1916 Butterworth and his men seized several trenches near Pozières, and he suffered a slight wound. The Military Cross followed, announced in the gazette on 25 August 1916, after he had already died.
The 23rd Division was told on 4 August, in the middle of the fighting at Pozières, to storm a German-held communication trench called Munster Alley. Troops dug a new assault trench and gave it their officer's name, Butterworth Trench. Through the night of 4 to 5 August the fighting was desperate, with heavy casualties, but Butterworth and his miners took Munster Alley and kept it. At 04:45 on 5 August, while the Germans threw everything into retaking it, a sniper shot him in the head. His men buried him quickly in the trench wall. Shelling in the last two years of the war was so fierce that his body could not be found for a proper burial.
Brigadier General Page Croft wrote to the composer's father about the death, unaware that the Military Cross had been awarded. The general was also surprised to find out that the dead officer was among the English composers of his generation who showed the greatest promise.
No grave was ever found, though his remains might lie in the Pozières Memorial cemetery close by. The Thiepval Memorial carries his name. Sir Alexander had a plaque placed in St Mary's Priory Church, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire, for his son and for his nephew Hugh, who was killed at Loos in 1915, and in 1918 had a memorial volume printed. Butterworth is among the 38 names on the Royal College of Music's war memorial.
Nearly all of his manuscripts passed to Vaughan Williams. When Vaughan Williams died, Ursula Vaughan Williams deposited the originals in the Bodleian in Oxford, and the folk song collection went to the English Folk Dance and Song Society.
He left a small body of work. Both before and during the war he got rid of pieces he was unhappy with, fearing he might not return to revise them. Among what remains, the settings of A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad poems are particularly famous. Eleven came in 1911 and 1912. No known folk melody is used in them, though one of them, When I Was One and Twenty, was reported to rest on a tune nobody has managed to name. Many English composers of his day, Vaughan Williams among them, also turned to Housman's poetry.
They appeared as two sets, Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad and Bredon Hill and Other Songs, and the composer never decided which order was best. Butterworth dedicated them to Victor Annesley Barrington-Kennett, whom he knew at Eton and at Oxford; this friend also lost his life in France in 1916. Nine were first heard on 16 May 1911 at Oxford, with James Campbell McInnes singing and Butterworth playing. Complete performances in public are uncommon, yet each set is often sung alone and keeps being recorded. The first set is the better liked, and Is My Team Ploughing? is the best known song in it.
Among the orchestral pieces, the rhapsody A Shropshire Lad received its first performance at the Leeds Festival on 2 October 1913, with Arthur Nikisch conducting. Two English Idylls (1911) and The Banks of Green Willow (1913) are shorter, and both are built on folk songs he had noted down in Sussex during 1907. Concert halls and recording studios return to them often, especially to the latter, which Adrian Boult conducted for the first time at West Kirby on 27 February 1914. The rhapsody quotes two of the songs, Loveliest of Trees and With Rue My Heart Is Laden, and its influence can be heard in Moeran's First Rhapsody, Finzi's A Severn Rhapsody and Vaughan Williams's A Pastoral Symphony. With Cecil Sharp, Butterworth also worked on The Country Dance Book, whose third part appeared in 1912 and fourth in 1916.
Pianists will find Love blows as the wind blows for voice and piano on the site, graded Advanced. W. E. Henley's poems are the text, and the cycle exists for voice with string quartet, for voice with piano and for voice with a small orchestra. The orchestral version holds three songs, while Fill a Glass with Golden Wine appears only in the other two forms. Butterworth's last piece of work before he left for France was the orchestral version.