Last Man Standing is a song cycle for baritone and orchestra written in 2018 by the British composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad and set to a text by Tamsin Collison.
The libretto describes the experiences of an anonymous soldier, whom the composer described as an "Everytommy," who enlists to fight in World War I. Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Tamsin Collinson, who had previously collaborated on the chamber opera Love Bytes in 2012, originally intended to base the text on the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon, but soon elected for a nameless protagonist who could "represent men of every rank and class."
"[2] Colin Anderson of Classical Source also praised the piece, remarking, "In a score full of wartime onomatopoeia – bugle-calls, drums, whistles, marches – and, borrowed or created, the use of soldiers' and popular songs (including 'Auld Lang Syne' on horn, harmonised bleakly), there is no doubting the sincerity of Frances-Hoad's setting, music of eerie quiet, lyrical eloquence, proud declarations of duty, the summoning to battle, and mood-swings reflecting the horrors of conflagration, a roll-call of losses – come together for a sinister musical cabaret musing on something all too real, musically engrossing and moving.
He continued:The chameleon-like nature of Frances-Hoad's music can be one of its most appealing qualities, but here that seems too arbitrary, and becomes just an easy, almost hackneyed way of triggering stock responses to the horrors of warfare.
The opening and closing numbers are pastiches of Butterworth's Housman settings, while elsewhere the reliance on soldiers' songs – When This Lousy War Is Over; We're Here Because We're Here – seems too obviously borrowed from Joan Littlewood's Oh!