A long - lose Christmas birdcall has been see at Oxford , and yes , it ’s about drinking . The score by George Butterworth , an English composer who died in the trenches of World War I , was uncovered at the university ’s Bodleian Libraries , whose researcher conceive it to be the only hold up written matter .
Butterworth , who was stick out in 1885 , was an avid collector and composer of folk medicine as well as an early adopter of new recording applied science . His work was comparatively popular by the metre he muster in in the infantry in 1914 , and accord to the Bodleian Libraries , he was see one of the most bright English composers of his prison term . He was killed in battle at 31 years old , and most of his composition were lose . He had destroyed much of his music before he get out for the warfare , thinking it was n’t worth preserve , though after his end his surviving compositions come to be lauded as masterpiece
The three - Sir Frederick Handley Page scotch for the lost Christmas song was detect by Martin Holmes , a music curator at the Bodleian Libraries , in a collection of uncataloged music that made its style from the university ’s music section to the university ’s Weston Library . The library is n’t certain where it came from , but it might have been donated by the composer ’s Padre to Butterworth ’s friend from Oxford , Sir Hugh Allen , who afterward became a music prof at the school . Allen ’s papers were donate to the Oxford Music Faculty Library after his death in 1946 .
consort to the library , the strain “ begin with the words ‘ Crown winter with green , And give him safe drink To physic his spleen … ’ and ends with the line ‘ And gay be we This near Yuletide . ' ” In the nervure of his other folk - exalt songs , “ he wrote the musical place setting for this verse form in the panache of a drunkenness birdcall , for phonation and forte-piano , ” the library’spress releasecontinues . The song was probably written ahead of time in Buttterworth ’s career sometime in the early 20th hundred . It ’s not a masterpiece , but it can provide scholars with a adept idea of how his compositional talent evolved .
The manuscript mark is on display at the Weston Library at Oxford through this weekend , where you could also listen to a recording of the vocal .
