Ex. 13-10: The Lads in Their Hundreds

No. 5 from George Butterworth's Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad (1911), setting poems by A. E. Housman.

Butterworth was killed by a sniper at the Battle of the Somme on 5 August 1916, aged 31. His men named the trench they captured "Butterworth Trench" in his honour. Before leaving for France, he destroyed many of his manuscripts, and only a small body of work survives.

The song tells of young men who leave home to "die in their glory and never be old." Butterworth himself died young in the war, just like the lads in the poem.

Butterworth was a close friend of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Together they walked through the English countryside collecting old folk songs from country singers, and Butterworth wrote down more than 450 of them. It was Butterworth who told Vaughan Williams, "You ought to write a symphony" — the idea that grew into A London Symphony. After Butterworth was killed, Vaughan Williams dedicated that symphony to his memory.

At the London premiere of these songs in 1911, the audience was so moved by this one that they asked to hear it again. Butterworth also reworked music from these songs into an orchestral piece, the rhapsody A Shropshire Lad.

From the album A Shropshire Lad by Blake Fischer and Claire Cooper (2000)
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