<\/p>
Hindsight can sometimes play tricks with our perception of a piece of music. A case in point is George Butterworth<\/a>\u2019s A Shropshire Lad<\/i> \u2013 this song cycle for baritone and piano has become so closely associated with the First World War<\/a> in which Butterworth lost his life that it is easy to forget that both AE Housman\u2019s words and the composer\u2019s musical setting actually date from several years earlier.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> The small first edition of Alfred Edward Housman\u2019s 63 poems collected under the now-famous title A Shropshire Lad<\/i> was published with very little fanfare in 1896, with some financial assistance from the author, a professor of Latin at University College, London. One of the critics who reviewed the book, Grant Richards, admired it so much that he bought the rights and reissued it under his own imprint. Keen for the poems to reach a wide audience, Housman welcomed the publication of cheap editions, including tiny volumes that fitted neatly into the breast pockets of soldiers serving on the western front. Its lyrical descriptions of the English countryside and weather, the references to many real places and the mood of nostalgia made A Shropshire Lad<\/i> the perfect companion for young men seeking an escape in their off-duty hours from the horror of the trenches.<\/span><\/p>\n Housman was not himself a Shropshire lad; he was born in a Worcestershire village and grew up in the town of Bromsgrove, now part of the Birmingham conurbation, where his father was a solicitor. The \u2018blue remembered hills\u2019 that he described formed the distant western horizon of his youth, and the poems were written in Highgate, North London. Curiously, he refused to allow individual poems to be anthologised in collections of verse, yet was quite happy to authorise them to be set to music, as long as no cuts or alterations were made and, he said, as long as he did not have to listen to performances, which he found an embarrassing experience. He forbade concert promoters from reproducing the texts in programme books, and was pained by the discovery that some composers had disregarded his wishes about tinkering with the poems.<\/span><\/p>\n He would have had quite a task keeping abreast with all of them \u2013 Peter Parker, researching his 2016 book Housman Country<\/i>, found that 47 composers produced 176 individual vocal settings between 1904 and 1940. Somervell, Vaughan Williams<\/a><\/strong> and Gurney are among those whose Housman settings have endured but even in this distinguished company Butterworth\u2019s stand out.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen was AE Housman\u2019s book of poems, A Shropshire Lad, <\/i>published?<\/span><\/h2>\n
When were they set to music?<\/h2>\n