Arthur Somervell - A Shropshire Lad (1904)

Sir Arthur Somervell (5 June 1863 -- 2 May 1937) was an English composer, and after Hubert Parry one of the most successful and influential writers of art song in the English music renaissance of the 1890s-1900s.

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Song Cycle "A Shropshire Lad"
Poetry by Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936)
Roman numerals are the numbers of the poems.

1. III Loveliest of Trees (0:00)
"There is little time for a lad to live and enjoy the spring "
2. XIII When I was One-and-Twenty (2:09)
"Unattainable love leaves the lad helpless and lost"
3. XIV There Pass the Careless People (3:26)
4. XXI In Summer-Time on Bredon (5:09)
5. XXII The Street Sounds to the Soldiers' Tread (9:01)
"The poet exchanges a glance with a marching soldier and wishes him well, thinking they will never cross paths again"
6. XXXV On the Idle Hill of Summer (10:59)
"If he is of no use to those he loves, he will leave, perhaps to enlist as a soldier"
7. XXXVI White in the Moon the Long Road Lies (13:20)
8. XLIX Think No More, Lad (16:29)
9. XL Into My Heart an Air that Kills (18:10)
"The wind sighs across England to him from Shropshire, but he will not see the broom flowering gold on Wenlock Edge"
10. XXIII The Lads in their Hundreds to Ludlow come in for the Fair (20:07)
"He envies the country lads who die young and do not grow old"

Christopher Maltman, baritone and Graham Johnson, piano

The King's Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI) was a light infantry regiment of the British Army, formed in the Childers Reforms of 1881, but with antecedents dating back to 1755. It served in the Second Boer War, World War I and World War II. In 1968, the four regiments of the Light Infantry Brigade (the KSLI, Somerset and Cornwall Light Infantry, King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and Durham Light Infantry) amalgamated to form The Light Infantry, with the 1st KSLI being redesignated as the 3rd Battalion of the new regiment.

A Shropshire Lad is a collection of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman, published in 1896. Selling slowly at first, it then rapidly grew in popularity, particularly among young readers. Composers began setting the poems to music less than ten years after their first appearance, and many parodists have satirised Housman's themes and poetic style.

Several composers wrote song cycles in which the poems, taken out of their sequence in the collection, contrast with each other or combine in a narrative dialogue. In a few cases they wrote more than one work using this material. The earliest, performed in 1904, less than ten years after the collection's first appearance, was Arthur Somervell's Song Cycle from A Shropshire Lad in which ten were set for baritone and piano.