Butterworth showed real talent that might have flourished but for his early death. The "Two English Idylls" and "The Banks of Green Willow" show an ability to handle folk song in a way that eluded many other composers – as the true building blocks of larger forms. His original music (especially the "Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad" and the orchestral song cycle "Love Blows As The Wind Blows") have a delicacy that brings to mind Debussy or Ibert. However, there is reasonable evidence that he had put composition behind him by the time he went to France, and it is by no means certain that he would have resumed it had he returned. It is certainly likely that he would have faced considerable pressure from friends to compose again, since his orchestral works (particularly the "Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad") had made a great impression, but he was a single-minded man who was unlikely to bow easily to such pressure. He remains perhaps the most obvious case of "what if...?" that is left to us from the battlefields of northern France, and he joins the Frenchman Albéric Magnard, the Spaniard Enrique Granados, and the German Rudi Stephan as possibly the greatest losses to music from the First World War. The great conductor Carlos Kleiber saw in Butterworth a special gift. In his 1978 appearance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra he programmed, to the surprise of many, Butterworth's "English Idyll No. 1".