Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Butterworth, George Sainton Kaye
BUTTERWORTH, GEORGE SAINTON KAYE (1885-1916), composer, was born 12 July 1885 at 16 Westbourne Square, London. He was the only child of (Sir) Alexander Kaye Butterworth, solicitor and subsequently general manager of the North Eastern Railway Company, by his wife, Julia Marguerite, daughter of George Wigan, M.D., of Portishead, Somerset. John Kaye, bishop of Lincoln [q.v.], was his great-grandfather, and John and Joseph Butterworthf [q.v.] were ancestors in the direct male line. His first school was at Aysgarth, Yorkshire, whence he entered Eton as a king’s scholar in 1899. He took part with credit in the intellectual, social, and athletic life of the school: music he studied with T. F. Dunhill, as well as with Christian G. Padel in York. From 1904 to 1908 he was in residence at Trinity College, Oxford; he took a third class in the honour school of literae humaniores, and was a prominent figure in musical circles, holding the presidency of the University Musical Club during the period October 1906 to March 1907.
After leaving Oxford, having abandoned his original intention of adopting the bar as a profession, Butterworth acted for a short time as one of the musical critics of The Times; and in 1909 accepted a teaching post at Radley College. In 1910 he returned to London, and worked for a few months at the Royal College of Music, studying the organ with Sir Walter Parratt, the piano with Herbert Sharpe, and theory with Charles Wood. The greatest influence on his musical ideals was derived from an intimate friendship with Ralph Vaughan Williams, whom he had first met in his Oxford days. He enlisted on the outbreak of war in August 1914, and was subsequently given a commission in the Durham Light Infantry. He was killed in action at Poziéres, in the first battle of the Somme, 5 August 1916. He had won the military cross in the previous month and was again recommended for it shortly before his death.
Butterworth was greatly attracted by English folk-music, and gave much time to research in this field; he was also a prominent worker for the English Folk-Dance Society, of which he was one of the founders. He collected and arranged an album of Sussex folk-songs; and, in conjunction with Cecil J. Sharp, published several books of country and morris dances. His original compositions, few in number but of very distinctive quality, include about twenty songs (more than half to words from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad), a suite for strings, and four orchestral pieces, three of which are idylls partially based on folk-song material, and the fourth a rhapsody thematically connected with some of the Shropshire Lad songs. This rhapsody (first produced under Arthur Nikisch at the Leeds festival of 1913) is his masterpiece, combining singularly individual imaginativeness with great command of orchestral technique; moods at once simple and intense made special appeal to him, and he expressed them with a sensitive intimacy that gives his work a notable place in contemporary English music.
[Memoir, privately printed, 1918; private information; personal knowledge.]