Friday Night at the Proms: In Memoriam WWI BBC Proms

Hello. Music written during the First World War

and works inspired by the events of 100 years ago

are featuring throughout the Proms this year

but above all others tonight's concert

feels like something of a Requiem to those who died -

the millions who formed the massed ranks of all sides -

and the individuals whose creative talent was brutally extinguished.

Conductor Andrew Manze and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra have won

high praise for their performances of Vaughan Williams' symphonies.

The composer finished his third - the Pastoral -

four years after the war had ended.

He never wanted it seen as an explicitly anti-war work

but ever since its first performances it's been interpreted as

an elegy for the dead and a meditation on peace.

Vaughan Williams served in the war but survived to reflect upon

the trauma through his art.

He lived to the ripe old age of 85.

The other three composers featured tonight -

FS Kelly, George Butterworth and Rudi Stephan -

were a decade or so younger than Vaughan Williams,

all in their 20s and early 30s

when they signed up to fight on different sides of the battle lines.

None came home.

It is impossible to imagine what might have been,

the big what-if-they-had-survived question,

creatively what they might have produced.

I suppose we think that because we know that

a lot of composers mature their styles...

It's interesting. Rudi Stephan, whose music we're going to hear,

died as a young man in the war.

His contemporary, fellow German composer Paul Hindemith,

also served in the army during the First World War but lived.

He'd been a romantic composer before the war.

He went on to become an expressionist composer

in the style of Schoenberg

before changing his style again and going to the States

and writing neo-classical music.

He had a chance to develop fully over the natural span of a life.

And, of course, Vaughan Williams himself

didn't achieve major public recognition

until in his late 30s.

He wrote the Fantasia Theme on Thomas Tallis in 1910 when he was 37.

I suppose it is striking that by the time

he had established a singular, public voice for himself,

he was older than all the men that we're talking about here,

Kelly, Stephan and Butterworth.

For me, Butterworth is the composer above all others who

epitomises the waste

of the First World War.

A talented musician only just into his 30s when he was killed

by a sniper at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

It's endlessly fascinating to wonder what he would have achieved

had he lived a little longer.

His settings of AE Housman's Shropshire Lad poems

are achingly beautiful.

They reflect a simple, pastoral existence

about to be swept away forever.

Hearing them is something I'm looking forward to this evening.

Me too. We're starting, though, with two composers

who came to be listed amongst the war dead.

FS - Frederick Septimus - Kelly,

writing an elegy for his friend, Rupert Brooke.

But first of all, a composer from across the battle lines,

German Rudi Stephan, 28 when he was killed on the Galician front in 1915.

hence the generic title of this work,

It was written two years before the war in 1912

from the events that lay ahead.

It really is an elegy for young and wasted lives.

Here is Andrew Manze with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

with Rudi Stephan's Music for Orchestra,

its performance the first time Stephan's music

has ever been heard at the Proms.

APPLAUSE

Wonderful to hear Rudi Stephan's Music for Orchestra

in this the centenary of World War I.

The work established his reputation

and secured him a publishing contract in 1913,

catapulting him to the forefront of promising young German composers.

Two years later, though, he was killed in Galicia.

In our next work, two victims of war are represented -

the poet Rupert Brooke

and the composer FS - Frederick Septimus - Kelly.

Australian born but Eton and Oxford educated,

Kelly seemed every inch the English gentleman.

He was an Edwardian sporting legend of private means,

winning a gold medal in rowing at the London Olympics of 1908.

In 1914, Kelly signed up for the Royal Naval Division

with a group of scholar-soldiers who became known as

The Latin Club,

composer Denis Browne and Rupert Brooke among them.

It's difficult to underestimate how important Brooke was.

His poetry captured the optimism of those opening months,

his works expressing an idealism

that contrasts with the bitter poetry

that came later in the conflict.

They seem to represent the good war death,

if such a thing is possible.

His personal glamour rather suited that mood.

WB Yeats called him, "The handsomest young man in England."

Here he is photographed in 1913.

That whole poem, The Soldier, would end up

etched on Brooke's own tomb.

When he and Kelly were on their way in February 1915

to fight at Gallipoli, Brooke was bitten by a mosquito

and went on to develop sepsis.

It's said that Kelly began writing his work In Memoriam

as his friend lay dying near him on board ship.

Kelly was there at Brooke's initial burial

on the Greek island of Skyros.

In the elegy, the harp and shimmering strings

evoke the rustling of an olive tree above the poet's grave.

There's a real sense of tragedy, pain, anger about this piece

but also redemption and beauty.

APPLAUSE

The work was first heard at Brooke's memorial concert in 1916.

shot while running through German machine-gun fire.

APPLAUSE

APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH

FS Kelly's Elegy for Strings: "In Memoriam Rupert Brooke",

Kelly's elegy was written very much in the thick of war,

whereas the next work was written in the peace of pre-war rural England.

But it is almost impossible to hear George Butterworth's

1911 setting of poems from AE Housman's A Shropshire Lad

except through the tragic prism of what was to follow

and specifically in the context of the composer's fate -

Butterworth would be killed by sniper fire

in the Battle of the Somme in August 1916.

soon after receiving the Military Cross.

He was 31.

Housman's collection of 63 poems was first published in 1896.

It's rather like Rupert Brooke,

According to one literary historian,

just before the war a copy was to be found

in every pocket in Britain.

After hostilities broke out, the Times

published a special lightweight edition for troops.

This book of poetry really did go to war.

It's not surprising that it had that resonance

because those young men who went to war

recognised themselves in that poetry.

They were farm hands and blacksmiths

and manual workers,

"the lads in their hundreds", going off to Ludlow Fair

and eyeing up the girls and drinking beer

and just full of optimism of their own youth.

I think also this sense of

blissful unawareness of what lay around the corner.

The poems drew a musical response unparalleled in English song.

Enormous following amongst composers of the English revival,

fascinated by folk song and the landscape.

Arthur Somervell did the first known setting in 1904,

followed by Vaughan Williams, Lennox Berkeley, Ivor Gurney,

the American composer Samuel Barber and many others.

But for all those composers, it's Butterworth's setting

that is the most famous.

I wonder why that is.

Is it because of the folk rhythms of the poetry,

the lyrical notion of the piano accompaniment that he had?

I think that has something to do with it but above all,

it's because Butterworth was himself.

another of those "lads in their hundreds"

as in Housman's poem.

Roderick Williams is going to sing the Shropshire Lad poems for us,

joining the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra,

Andrew Manze conducting, George Butterworth at the Proms.

# 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... #

# When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say

# Give crowns and pounds and guineas

# But not your heart away

# Give pearls away and rubies

# But keep your fancy free

# But I was one-and-twenty

# No use to talk to me

# When I was one-and-twenty

# I heard him say again

# The heart out of the bosom

# Was never given in vain

# 'Tis paid with sighs a plenty

# And sold for endless rue

# And I am two-and-twenty

# And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true

# 'Tis true... #

# Look not in my eyes, for fear

# Thy mirror true the sight I see

# And there you find your face too clear

# And love it and be lost like me

# One the long nights through must lie

# Spent in star-defeated sighs

# But why should you as well as I perish?

# Gaze not in my eyes

# A Grecian lad, as I hear tell

# One that many loved in vain

# Looked into a forest well

# And never looked away again

# There, when the turf in springtime flowers

# Stands amid the glancing showers

# Think no more, lad Laugh, be jolly

# Why should men make haste to die?

# Empty heads and tongues a-talking

# Make the rough road easy walking

# And the feather pate of folly

# Bears the falling sky

# Oh, 'tis jesting, dancing, drinking

# Spins the heavy world around

# If young hearts were not so clever

# Oh, they would be young for ever

# Lays lads underground

# Why should men make haste to die?

# Empty heads and tongues a-talking

# Make the rough road easy walking

# And the feather pate of folly

# Bears the falling sky... #

# The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair

# There's men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold

# The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there

# And there with the rest are the lads that will never be old

# There's chaps from the town and the field and the till and the cart

# And many to count are the stalwart and many the brave

# And many the handsome of face and the handsome of heart

# And few that will carry their looks or their truth to the grave

# I wish one could know them I wish there were tokens to tell

# The fortunate fellows that now you can never discern

# And then one could talk with them friendly and wish them farewell

# And watch them depart on the way that they will not return

# But now you may stare as you like and there's nothing to scan

# And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told

# They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man

# The lads that will die in their glory and never be old... #

# Is my team ploughing

# That I was used to drive

# And hear the harness jingle

# When I was man alive?

# Ay, the horses trample

# The harness jingles now

# No change though you lie under

# The land you used to plough

# Is football playing

# Along the river shore

# With lads to chase the leather

# Now I stand up no more?

# Ay, the ball is flying

# The lads play heart and soul

# The goal stands up, the keeper

# Stands up to keep the goal

# Is my girl happy

# That I thought hard to leave

# And has she tired of weeping

# As she lies down at eve?

# Ay, she lies down lightly

# She lies not down to weep

# Your girl is well contented

# Be still, my lad, and sleep

# Is my friend hearty

# Now I am thin and pine

# And has he found to sleep in

# A better bed than mine?

# Yes, lad, I lie easy

# I lie as lads would choose

# I cheer a dead man's sweetheart

# Never ask me whose... #

APPLAUSE

Six Songs From A Shropshire Lad by George Butterworth,

orchestrated by Phillip Brookes,

sung by Roderick Williams,

with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

Roderick Williams' ability to just stand on the stage

and deliver these songs as if he was having a conversation

is extraordinary, and immediately conveying the heartbreaking

waste and pain of the war years.

That was so beautiful.

I really felt that that brought something new

to the poems that I know, such a central part of English culture.

So many writers refer to Housman, but to hear this setting,

in this year, sung by this man - wonderful.

CHEERING

George Butterworth's output over his short life was small

but influential. There's no doubt he was one of the great losses to music

caused by the war. Most of his manuscripts

were left to his close friend Vaughan Williams,

but Butterworth had already destroyed many works

that he was dissatisfied with in case he was killed

and didn't have the chance to revise them.

of young men, weren't they, Petroc,

who went to war, and in Britain they included

Yes. I'm very interested in Cecil Coles.

We hear very little of his music today - a Scottish composer

who served with Queen Victoria's Rifles, became their bandmaster.

called Behind The Lines. He sent the manuscripts

was stained with the mud of the field and with bloodstains.

Coles was killed near the Somme in 1918

and in a terrible irony, one of them is a poignant funeral march.

So many young musicians were lost.

Across the road from where we are now, at the Royal College of Music,

there's a memorial plaque in the

and never got the chance to return to their studies,

40 from the RCM killed in the First World War alone,

Butterworth amongst them. Ivor Gurney, unusually,

both a war poet and a composer,

his wartime experience expressed through both art forms.

He would write songs by candlelight while he was in a trench.

He served 15 months on the front

and then returned. He'd been shot, gassed.

He was already in a pretty delicate mental state before the war,

but he suffered afterwards from the most terrible shellshock.

A few years later,

he summed up his feelings in a piece called War Elegy,

written in 1920, an incredibly personal response to the war

that we heard here at the Proms earlier in the season.

It's interesting - like poets, composers reacted to

and processed that huge experience of war

in all sorts of different ways and different voices,

combatants as well as civilians.

You could trace a sort of long journey from the Boy's Own adventure

to the recognition of the desolation and the loss that was felt.

There were wartime poets on both sides of the divide,

both British and German, and they ranged from both being jingoistic

as well as being anti-Establishment.

Here, in Britain, there was Jessie Pope's kind of nationalistic view

of all of this, that in fact you could see war

as fun, dare we even say.

She asked, "Who would much rather come back with a crutch

"than lie low and be out of the fun?"

Wilfred Owen castigated her for selling, as he put it,

the old lie, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori -

it is sweet and proper to die for your country,

as it translates,

but I think there was this major change around the war

in all the art forms,

going from a sort of sense of grandeur

to something much more internalised and much more reflective,

and that feeling, I suppose, that war was changing everything,

that the first doubts were coming in

about the future of the British Empire, for example.

You think about Elgar writing

the patriotism of his Pomp And Circumstance Marches,

and then, after the war, writing his Cello Concerto,

which is so elegiac

and really just sends out this message

that everything has changed.

Vaughan Williams always wrote out of a strong identification

and empathy with the common man.

The effect of the war on him and his music was profound.

He poured his experiences into works such as his 3rd Symphony,

the Pastoral, that we'll hear in the second half of tonight's concert.

It's an understated, beautiful monument to loss.

In 1916, Vaughan Williams wrote to his friend Gustav Holst

about the lost and shattered generation.

"I sometimes dread coming back to normal life with so many gaps,

"especially, of course, George Butterworth.

"Out of those seven who joined up together in August 1914,

"only three are left.

"I sometimes think that it's wrong

"to have made friends with people much younger than oneself,

"because soon there will be only the middle-aged left."

Vaughan Williams was 42 when he enlisted

and he went on to join the Royal Army Medical Corps

on the Western Front, tending to the sick, the dying and the dead.

By 1914, he already had a considerable body of work

including two symphonies and the Fantasia,

and, Petroc, just before the outbreak of war, he wrote the original violin

and piano version of that enduringly popular The Lark Ascending.

Yes, the piece associated with him more than any other.

His wartime experiences had profound effect on him.

He was discharged in 1919, returned to his alma mater,

the RCM, as a teacher, and although there were no startling changes

in style of his musical compositions and musical output,

I think most people detected a new sense of sadness and austerity,

an intensity about his music.

And that's certainly been underlined by the idea of the Pastoral

having a kind of darkness to it, a restlessness.

The conductor Sir Mark Elder said that, "You have this sense of

"a feeling of never sitting, always shifting.

"Not all the landscapes have cherished abundancy.

"It's the landscape of death."

Yeah. And the four movements of the 3rd Symphony

may be depicting the shell-torn landscape of the Western Front.

I think that's a fair interpretation.

Another great British conductor, Sir Roger Norrington,

describes the 3rd Symphony as being a bit like a four seasons of the war

and of the countryside, starting in high summer,

but not a time for celebration because so many people have died.

Then we get to autumn, harvest,

but this isn't a harvest of wheat, it's a harvest of men.

The third movement, winter, Christmas at the front,

those strange celebrations and truces and pauses.

The fourth movement is spring.

Again, spring normally a happy time, but here there's no renewal.

Let's go back to the second movement,

because that was inspired by a lone bugler, wasn't it?

He heard this bugler playing in the desecrated landscape of the Somme

and decided to replicate that. He replaces it not with a bugle

but with a trumpet, and the trumpeter plays slightly flat.

You might think, hearing this for the first time,

there's been some terrible tuning problem. Not at all.

It's absolutely intentional.

APPLAUSE

And conductor Andrew Manze has been a great champion of Vaughan Williams.

Here he is to direct the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

in Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony No 3.

# Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah

# Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah

# Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah

# Ah, ah, ah-ah-ah, ah, ah, ah

# Ah, ah, ah, ah-ah, ah

# Ah, ah, ah, ah. #

APPLAUSE

A wordless voice singing the music back into silence.

Allan Clayton, former Radio Three New Generation artist.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

With Andrew Manze conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

in Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony,

his Third Symphony.

What I found really moving about this concert

was that it was bookended by a German composer who died

in the first year of the war

and ended with the response by a man who didn't have to go to war

but did and then produces something as sublime

as the Pastoral.

That brings to an end this special In Memoriam World War I Prom.

Music from the concert and much more

will be discussed by Katie Derham and guests

in Proms Extra on BBC Two tomorrow night at seven.

I'll be back next Friday with the phenomenon

that is Daniel Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

Guaranteed to be an exciting evening.

My co-host will be the organist-conductor Wayne Marshall.

For now, good night. Good night.

# Take my hand... #

Flirtation...

..becomes seduction...