George Butterworth. Orchestral Works.

Kuykendall, James Brooks

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. xxxvxliii; editorial notes, p. xliv; acknowledgments, p. xlv; facsims., p. xlvixlix; 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 [pounds sterling].]

Musica Britannica has in its ninetysecond volume finally made it to the twentieth century. Admittedly, the two volumes surveying the song repertories of Hubert Parry (vol. 49, published 1982) and Charles Villiers Stanford (vol. 52, pub. 1986) contain 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 publishers" (quoted in Julian Rushton, "Voice of Britain," The 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 faithful editions, albeit nearly a century old and now freely downloadable. In this light it is difficult to see the present volume as necessary for much more than canonization, and it is curious to note that it was a rather late entry to the Musica Britannica rolls, judging from the preceding volumes' lists of volumes in preparation.

The significance of George Butterworth (1885-1916) in British music history is secured principally on the high esteem in which Ralph Vaughan Williams held him (long intending, indeed, that his own estate would benefit the Butterworth Trust; in the end, he opted to establish the RVW Trust, but he would certainly have been delighted 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 glory and never be old," to quote a memorable A. E. Housman line that Butterworth set in his Six Songs from "A Shropshire Lad" (1911). But was he in his "glory" at all? Did he advance beyond just the first glimmers of early maturity? It is difficult to know, because in an effort to set his house in order before going off to the trenches, he destroyed the manuscripts of many of his early works. The whole of Butterworth's extant orchestral oeuvre is represented by the four short works (plus a fragment) included 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 difficult to say, and there is no indication that a future Butterworth volume is planned. This is a missed opportunity. The Butterworth materials reside principally at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University; Peter Ward Jones, who spent a long career as music librarian there, is as knowledgeable as anyone on these sources. (Such a comprehensive 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 The Land of Lost Content (a Housman reference), and subsequently The Cherry Tree (as it borrows substantial motivic material from Butterworth's setting of Housman's "Loveliest of Trees"). When it was published by Novello in 1917 the title page read "A SHROPSHIRE LAD / RHAPSODY / FOR FULL ORCHESTRA" and it has been generally known as simply A Shropshire Lad. Musica Britannica opts for the version ultimately preferred by the composer, the slightly but significantly different A "Shropshire Lad" Rhapsody, a tide which diminishes the programmatic character and puts it in the company of generic tides qualified by a fillin-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 indefinite article in the title). The Rhapsody is the most substantial work in the volume, and provides the most textual interest, with six sources cited. In fact, however, the posthumous Novello edition has been generally disregarded as having "no authorial authority" (p. xxxv), although the extremely close correspondence of the old and new editions demonstrates the remarkable textual fidelity of the extant sources, about which more below.

The other completed pieces are three short works for small orchestra with generally double woodwinds and reduced brass, a series he designated as English Idylls (Founded on Folk-Tunes). The last of these has been circulated only in a later form entided The Banks of Green Willow. The present volume includes the original form in an appendix, and comparison of the two is extremely instructive--facilitated because the systems of the two scores are cast off identically. The later is hardly a revision of the earlier work, but rather a rescoring. This is especially intriguing because the music is disposed quite differently among almost exactly the same forces: the second pair of horns of the first version are replaced by a sole F trumpet in the later, but otherwise the ensemble is identical, as is the melodic and harmonic content in all but a few details. The textures of the two versions contrast remarkably, not merely because of alterations to accommodate the removal of two horns.

The editor does not suggest a reason for Butterworth's reworking of this third English Idyll even before it received a performance. May it have been prompted by the premiere of A "Shropshire Lad" Rhapsody at the Leeds Festival in 1913? Butterworth had intended to conduct the premiere, but seems to have gotten cold feet and left it in the hands of Arthur Nikisch, who made a formidable impression on the composer. Butterworth's reaction (to Adrian Boult) at the final rehearsal reveals this: "at the first rehearsal in London last week there were half-a-dozen small points I told him about. I was surprised that he didn't try any of them at the time, but he has remembered everything I said" (p. xxx). As the composer observed a master conductor at work, he may well have perceived something about what the players needed from the musical text and what they needed front the podium. Certainly the second version of The Banks of Green Willow is a less fussy score. Where in the first version the composer dictates breaths for woodwinds by truncating the final note of a phrase and specifying a rest (a mannerism found also in the first of the English Idylls), the later score replaces these with full-value notes. This allows the slurs to indicate the phrasing without micromanaging the details--a subtle change, but it suggests that with ensemble experience Butterworth came to have more confidence in the musical sense of the players, and to entrust more to them and to the conductor.

The volume's appendix includes also a torso--the Orchestral Fantasia which Butterworth was working on during the months before his enlistment in the army in September 1914. Even in its fragmentary state it is a fascinating work, although it does not quite live up to the billing that "it shows the composer setting out in a bolder direction," nor does it give "some insight into his working methods" (p. xvii). The latter might have been the case, but the work is presented in this volume in a curious hybrid of critical edition and diplomatic transcription: the published transcription "aims to present the latest state of the composer's work" on the score, so that "explicitly deleted notes have been disregarded" (p. xliv). As the cost of high-resolution digital scans has decreased even as the potential quality in print has increased (no longer even as tipped-in plates), it is a pity that the fragment was not included in facsimile. It would have required fourteen pages to include scans of the full musical text--the same number required by the computer-set edition (of which the casting-off may well be identical)--and it would have presented considerably more information about the composer's working methods, while nothing in particular is gained from the edited "latest state" presented.

Textual commentary is extremely brief, and not always accurate (e.g., two notes for the Rhapsody [mm. 71 and 98] concern markings present in the 1917 Novello edition but allegedly omitted in the Musica Britannica text, and yet these markings remain in the new score). What constitutes triviality in textual notes may always be a matter of opinion. Editors naturally want something to show for all of the effort that goes into producing a critical edition, and often may prefer to retain a note that may not suggest anything useful to the user. (Is there a substantial difference between molto crescendo and crescendo molto for a given passage, especially when both appear in autograph sources? [p. 148]) The editorial task of this volume may have been particularly frustrating in this regard, as the composer took evident care that the few sources that remained for posterity were faithful in their transmission of a unified text. Of the three manuscript full scores of the Rhapsody, the composer has marked his original autograph as "not quite correct," and two copyists' scores as "more or less correct" and "correct copy" respectively (p. xxxvii). Even so, the differences between these scores--as reported in the textual commentary--are minimal, even negligible. With a composer as scrupulous as this, an editor's task is much less textual analysis than it is describing the genesis, context, and sources of the work. This Jones accomplishes admirably, and herein lies the principal value of the new edition. The musical texts are generally very close to the first editions (slightly less so in the case of The Banks of Green Willow), but the profile of these works and their composer is raised by their inclusion in a historical monument--and thus on the shelves of many more libraries. The two early English Idylls deserve wider notice, and including them in such a volume with two standard English orchestral works may help to achieve that.

Musica Britannica aims also to provide full performing material for the works in the series, but it is hard to imagine that the new editions offer enough to performers to supersede the old editions--if, that is, the previously published (presumably manuscript or lithographed) orchestral parts are as in as good textual shape as the posthumous engraved scores. The new edition gives no grounds on which to make such a judgment. Jones does not account for any performing material, with the sole exception of a manuscript violin I part from the premiere of the Rhapsody (1913--that is, some four years before Novello's publication of the full score and the preparation of new materials to go with it), and even so it is difficult to know what to make of it, as this source figures in precisely none of the textual notes, but is reported merely to accord with the "more or less correct" copy of the full score. In fact, the new edition may well be harder for performers to use, as it removes all of the rehearsal letters from the first editions, adding measure numbers instead. This may seem a trivial point, but such letters are a time-saver in rehearsal, particularly when editions get mixed up in orchestral libraries or publishers' hire collections; more than this, even when they do not descend from the composer (as is presumably the case here, although this goes without comment in the edition), the letters convey something of the performance tradition of demarcations of the music--of how the musicians encounter the work in rehearsal. The exclusion of rehearsal letters may be a Musica Britannica policy that bears reconsideration, especially if the series continues to present music already available and widely performed from published editions, even if a new edition presents a text that varies widely from its predecessors.

In summary, the volume provides a very good presentation of four works already well presented in public-domain editions, and the lucid introduction is the best brief account of Butterworth as composer yet. The volume will go into research libraries anyway, as part of a monumental edition, and as such it represents the final triumph of Sir Alexander Kaye Butterworth's strenuous efforts to immortalize his deceased son through his music; Musica Britannica did not exist then, but Sir Alexander would have labored tirelessly to get George into that canon. For libraries acquiring such volumes individually, it is harder to make a case, unless there is a particular interest for this repertoire; when funds are scarce, it is perhaps better to reserve them for something otherwise not available in any edition. For individuals working on British orchestral music before World War I, the appendix is of tremendous importance, giving us entirely new perspectives on Butterworth's trajectory. If that trajectory was not as daring as the editor suggests, it was no less important as a voice resonant with a world that was about to change even as it silenced him.

JAMES BROOKS KUYKENDALL

Erskine College