By Footpath and Stile

By Footpath and Stile is a song cycle for baritone and string quartet by English composer Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) set to poems by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928).

[3] Composed in 1921-1922, it was premiered on 24 October 1923 by the baritone Sumner Austin and the Charles Woodhouse String Quartet in a British Music Society concert at 6 Queen Square, London.

In April 1934 Finzi wrote about the withdrawal in a letter to his friend Howard Ferguson: "They are all really bad works, though I may one day revise Footpath and Stile.

That year he wrote in his personal catalogue of works that apart from those revised songs, "the original withdrawn edition should be utterly forgotten" and labelled it as a "premature publication".

Andrew Clements called the quartet writing "rather stodgy" and said that the vocal lines "only intermittently seem personal", but also said that the subject matter (death and transience) is totally characteristic of Finzi's later work.

[9] An anonymous critic in BBC Music Magazine called the cycle "striking", "impressive in Finzi's equable way", and "responding memorably to the cool-climate vividness of the poems".