Apart from the breathtaking beauty of his musical compositions, it is the ethos of Butterworth that attracts me. He was rooted in the soil and soul of England and enamoured of its shires. He was a true localist before the word was invented, the very antithesis of the modern and modish cosmopolitan.

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

As the recent commemoration of Remembrance Day in the UK and Veterans’ Day in the USA recedes into the distance, like the faded medals and faded memories of those whom they commemorate, I’d like to remember a fallen hero of the First World War whose life was extinguished in the trenches but whose work sings across the wilderness of the years. This is George Butterworth, a great English composer whose genius rivalled that of his friend, Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Apart from the breathtaking beauty of his musical compositions, it is the ethos of Butterworth that attracts me. He was rooted in the soil and soul of England and enamoured of its shires. He was a true localist before the word was invented, the very antithesis of the modern and modish cosmopolitan, the latter of whom is tossed like tumbleweed wherever the winds of fashion blow his philandering spirit. It was this latter sort whom T. S. Eliot had in mind when he peopled his Waste Land with hollow men, vacuous and venal. “What are the roots that clutch,” Eliot asked, “what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”

George Butterworth

Butterworth was not of this sort. He was rooted. He clutched and clung to the living culture of his native land. He was a friend of Cecil Sharp, the celebrated collector of English folk songs, folk dances and instrumental music, whose monumental influence led to the folk-song revival during the early years of the twentieth century. Inspired by Sharp’s example and by the fruits of his labour, Butterworth and Vaughan Williams made many trips to the English countryside collecting traditional folk songs, listening to the songs of shepherds and ploughmen. Many of these trips were to rural Sussex, the spirit of which was being evoked and eulogized at that very time by Hilaire Belloc, whose own songs, poems and poetic prose praised what he called “the South Country”. United in spirit with Beloc, Butterworth composed his Folk Songs from Sussex at around the same time that Belloc was writing The Four Men, his book-length prose elegy to the South Country.

The folk songs which Butterworth collected during his sojourns in the shires of England (more than 450 in number) would be a significant influence on his own work and on that of Vaughan Williams. Imbibing the rural spirit of the shires he’d visited, he learned the rustic dances, as well as the music. He became a keen and very proficient folk dancer, especially of morris dancing. As a founding member in 1906 of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, he became a professional dancer as part of the Society’s Demonstration Team.

It is, however, for the few musical compositions that he wrote in his all too brief life that his considerable reputation rests.

Apart from the influence of traditional folk songs and music, Butterworth derived inspiration from the poetry of his native land. Whereas his Two English Idylls for orchestra and The Banks of Green Willow were inspired by folk music, his Rhapsody for Orchestra, A Shropshire Lad, was inspired by A. E. Housman’s recently published collection of poems of that title.

Butterworth would later set eleven of the poems from A Shropshire Lad to music, as well as composing music for the poetry of W. E. Henley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Bridges, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Oscar Wilde, the last of which was a moving accompaniment to Wilde’s heartrending “Requiescat”, written in memory of his sister who was only nine years old when she died.

Although Butterworth’s lasting legacy is his sublime contribution to music, a few words should be said of his war service.

In the flush of enthusiasm that accompanied the beginning of the war, Butterworth joined countless others in volunteering for military service. Initially, he enlisted as a private in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry but later accepted a commission as a second lieutenant in the Durham Light Infantry. As with his exact contemporary, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who also served as a second lieutenant, Butterworth earned distinction for heroism in battle. Sassoon captured an enemy trench single-handed, armed with grenades, scattering the sixty German soldiers; he was later awarded the Military Cross “for conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy’s trenches”. Butterworth was also awarded the Military Cross after he and his men succeeded in capturing a series of enemy trenches but, unlike Sassoon, he never lived to receive it. On August 5, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, he was shot in the head by a German sniper. His body was buried hastily but was never recovered following the two further years of heavy bombardment in the area. There is indeed a corner of a foreign field that is forever England….

Unlike so many others, and unlike George Butterworth, Siegfried Sassoon survived the war, living to a ripe old age and being received into the Catholic Church as a septuagenarian in 1957, dying ten years later. By that time, Butterworth had been dead for more than half a century. The two men had so much in common. Butterworth was a musician who loved poetry; Sassoon was a poet who loved music. Since this is so, we will let the words of Sassoon serve as a fitting tribute to Butterworth in the words of his poem, “Secret Music”:

I keep such music in my brain

No din this side of death can quell;

Glory exulting over pain,

And beauty, garlanded in hell.

My dreaming spirit will not heed

The roar of guns that would destroy

My life that on the gloom can read

Proud-surging melodies of joy.

To the world’s end I went, and found

Death in his carnival of glare;

But in my torment I was crowned,

And music dawned above despair.

The last words, serving as the last post of remembrance for the genius of George Butterworth and as a counterpoint to the words of Rupert Brooke with which we began, will be those of Hilaire Belloc:

 He does not die that can bequeath

Some influence to the land he knows,

Or dares, persistent, interwreath

Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;

  He does not die but still remains

  Substantiate with his darling plains.

The spring’s superb adventure calls

His dust athwart the woods to flame;

His boundary river’s secret falls

Perpetuate and repeat his name.

  He rides his loud October sky:

  He does not die. He does not die.

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay; the image of George Butterworth is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.