Description
Butterworth’s Loveliest of Trees is the first (and most famous) of Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad – a song cycle for baritone and piano composed in 1911. Each song is a setting of a poem from A. E. Housman’s 1896 collection A Shropshire Lad.
In Loveliest of trees a young man ponders the transitoriness of life and beauty through the analogy of the short-lived blossom of the cherry tree. In essence, life is short, enjoy it while you can. The poem is Housman’s best known, and its popularity endures to this day:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Butterworth’s music beautifully captures the fleeting beauty of spring and the reflection on human mortality. Loveliest of Trees later formed the basis for his 1912 orchestral rhapsody, A Shropshire Lad. For an arrangement for quintet of Shropshire Lad visit this page.
