Ivor Bertie Gurney (28 August 1890 - 26 December 1937) was an
EnglishEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
composerA composer is a person who creates music, usually by musical notation, for interpretation and performance. The level of distinction between composers and other musicians varies, which affects issues such as copyright and the deference given to individual interpretations of a particular piece of...
and
war poetThe term war poet came into currency during and after World War I. A number of poets writing in English had been soldiers, and had written about their experiences of war. Quite a number had died, most famously Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and Charles Sorley...
.
Born at 3 Queen Street,
GloucesterGloucester is a city, district and county town of Gloucestershire in the South West region of England. Gloucester lies close to the Welsh border, and on the River Severn, approximately north-east of Bristol, and south-southwest of Birmingham....
in 1890, Gurney sang as a chorister at
Gloucester CathedralGloucester Cathedral, or the Cathedral Church of St Peter and the Holy and Undivided Trinity, in Gloucester, England, stands in the north of the city near the river...
, from 1900 to 1906, when he became an articled pupil of
Dr Herbert BrewerSir Arthur Herbert Brewer was an English composer and organist. As organist of Gloucester Cathedral from 1896 until his death, he contributed a good deal to the Three Choirs Festival for 30 years....
at the cathedral. During this time he met composer
Herbert HowellsHerbert Norman Howells CH was an English composer, organist, and teacher.-Life:Howells was born in Lydney, Gloucestershire, and was the youngest of six children born to Oliver and Elizabeth Howells. His father was an amateur organist, and Herbert himself showed early musical promise...
, also a pupil of Brewer, and, in 1908, he met the future poet
F. W. HarveyFrederick William Harvey was an English poet, known for poems composed in prisoner-of-war camps at Krefeld and Gütersloh that were sent back to England, during World War I....
. Gurney began composing music at the age of 14, and won a scholarship to the
Royal College of MusicThe Royal College of Music is a conservatoire located in the South Kensington district of London, England.-Background:The Royal College of Music's building, designed by Sir Arthur Blomfield, is situated on Prince Consort Road in the district of South Kensington, next to Imperial College, directly...
in 1911.
Ivor Bertie Gurney (28 August 1890 - 26 December 1937) was an
EnglishEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
composerA composer is a person who creates music, usually by musical notation, for interpretation and performance. The level of distinction between composers and other musicians varies, which affects issues such as copyright and the deference given to individual interpretations of a particular piece of...
and
war poetThe term war poet came into currency during and after World War I. A number of poets writing in English had been soldiers, and had written about their experiences of war. Quite a number had died, most famously Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and Charles Sorley...
.
Born at 3 Queen Street,
GloucesterGloucester is a city, district and county town of Gloucestershire in the South West region of England. Gloucester lies close to the Welsh border, and on the River Severn, approximately north-east of Bristol, and south-southwest of Birmingham....
in 1890, Gurney sang as a chorister at
Gloucester CathedralGloucester Cathedral, or the Cathedral Church of St Peter and the Holy and Undivided Trinity, in Gloucester, England, stands in the north of the city near the river...
, from 1900 to 1906, when he became an articled pupil of
Dr Herbert BrewerSir Arthur Herbert Brewer was an English composer and organist. As organist of Gloucester Cathedral from 1896 until his death, he contributed a good deal to the Three Choirs Festival for 30 years....
at the cathedral. During this time he met composer
Herbert HowellsHerbert Norman Howells CH was an English composer, organist, and teacher.-Life:Howells was born in Lydney, Gloucestershire, and was the youngest of six children born to Oliver and Elizabeth Howells. His father was an amateur organist, and Herbert himself showed early musical promise...
, also a pupil of Brewer, and, in 1908, he met the future poet
F. W. HarveyFrederick William Harvey was an English poet, known for poems composed in prisoner-of-war camps at Krefeld and Gütersloh that were sent back to England, during World War I....
. Gurney began composing music at the age of 14, and won a scholarship to the
Royal College of MusicThe Royal College of Music is a conservatoire located in the South Kensington district of London, England.-Background:The Royal College of Music's building, designed by Sir Arthur Blomfield, is situated on Prince Consort Road in the district of South Kensington, next to Imperial College, directly...
in 1911. He studied there with
Charles Villiers StanfordSir Charles Villiers Stanford was an Irish composer, resident in England for much of his life.- Life :...
, who also taught
Ralph Vaughan WilliamsRalph Vaughan Williams OM was an English composer of symphonies, chamber music, opera, choral music, and film scores...
,
John Ireland- Life :John Ireland was born in Bowdon, near Altrincham, Manchester, into a family of Scottish descent and some cultural distinction. His father, Alexander Ireland, a publisher and newspaper proprietor, was aged 70 at John's birth. John was the youngest of the five children of Alexander's second...
,
Marion M. ScottMarion Margaret Scott was an English violinist, musicologist, writer, music critic, editor, composer, and poet.-Biography:...
,
Rebecca ClarkeRebecca Clarke may refer to:*Rebecca Helferich Clarke , English classical composer and violist*Rebecca Sophia Clarke , American author of children's fiction*Rebecca Clarke...
,
Frank Bridge-Life:Bridge was born in Brighton and studied at the Royal College of Music in London from 1899 to 1903 under Charles Villiers Stanford and others. He played the viola in a number of string quartets, most notably the English String Quartet, and conducted, sometimes deputising for Henry Wood, before...
,
Arthur BlissSir Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss, CH, KCVO was a British composer.-Birth, education and WWI:Born to an American father and English mother, Bliss attended Bilton Grange Preparatory School and Rugby before entering Cambridge University...
, Howells and many others. Stanford told Howells that Gurney was potentially "the biggest of them all", but he was "unteachable".
Gurney's studies were interrupted by
World War IWorld War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...
as he enlisted as a private soldier in the Gloucestershire Regiment. He was wounded in April 1917 and gassed in September the same year. After his release from hospital he was posted to
Seaton Delaval Seaton Delaval is a village in Northumberland, England, with a population of about 7,000 it is the largest of the five villages in the Seaton Valley and is the site of Seaton Delaval Hall the masterpiece completed by Sir John Vanbrugh in 1727....
, a mining village in
NorthumberlandNorthumberland is a ceremonial county and unitary district in the North East of England. It borders Cumbria to the west, County Durham to the south and Tyne and Wear to the south east, as well as having a border with the Scottish Borders council area to the north, and nearly eighty miles of North...
, where he wrote poems including 'Lying awake in the ward'. His first volume of poetry,
Severn and Somme, was published in November 1917, followed by
War's Embers in 1919.
By March 1918 Gurney was in the Gallery Ward in
Brancepeth CastleBrancepeth Castle is in the village of Brancepeth in County Durham, England, some 5 miles south-west of the city of Durham . It is a Grade I listed building....
, County Durham, where he wrote several songs, despite the piano sounding like
"a boiler factory in full swing because of the stone walls". After the war, he returned to London to resume his music studies at the RCM with Vaughan Williams.
Gurney suffered from
bipolar disorderBipolar disorder, also known as manic depressive disorder, manic depression or bipolar affective disorder, is a serious mental disorder that describes a category of mood disorders defined by the presence of one or more episodes of abnormally elevated mood clinically referred to as mania or, if...
or manic-depressive illness, which showed symptoms during his mid-teens and led to his first documented breakdown in 1913, followed by a major breakdown in the spring of 1918 while he was still in uniform. His 1918 nervous breakdown was triggered by the failure of his relationship with VAD Annie Nelson Drummond whom he met when he was a patient at the Edinburgh War Hospital.(September to October 1917). The notion of Gurney as a victim of shell shock derives from Gurney's close friend, the critic-musicologist Marion Scott, who wrote the initial press releases after Gurney's death suggesting that his illness was connected to the war. She also wrote the first
Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians entry on Gurney using the term "shell shock".
Although Gurney seemed to thrive after the war when he was regarded as one of the most promising men of his generation, his untreated bipolar illness continued to worsen. By 1922, his condition had deteriorated to the point where his family had him declared insane. He spent the last 15 years of his life in mental hospitals, first for a short period at Barnwood House in Gloucester, and then at the
City of London Mental HospitalStone House Hospital, formerly the City of London Lunatic Asylum, was a hospital and former mental illness treatment facility in Stone, near Dartford, Kent, in the United Kingdom...
,
DartfordDartford is the principal town in the borough of Dartford. It is situated in the northwest corner of Kent, England, 16 miles east south-east of central London....
, where he was diagnosed as suffering from "delusional insanity (systematized)" He continued to write poetry and a scattering of music, which was collected and preserved by Scott and later edited by
Edmund BlundenEdmund Charles Blunden, MC was an English poet, author and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong...
,
Gerald FinziGerald Raphael Finzi was a British composer. Finzi is best-known as a song-writer, but also wrote in other genres...
, and others.
Death
Gurney died of
tuberculosisTuberculosis is a common and often deadly infectious disease caused by mycobacteria...
while still a patient at the City of London Mental Hospital on 26 December 1937, aged 47. He was buried in Twigworth, near
GloucesterGloucester is a city, district and county town of Gloucestershire in the South West region of England. Gloucester lies close to the Welsh border, and on the River Severn, approximately north-east of Bristol, and south-southwest of Birmingham....
.
Gurney wrote hundreds of poems and more than 300 songs as well as instrumental music. He set only a handful of his own poems, the best known being
Severn Meadows. His best-known compositions include his Five
ElizabethanElizabeth I was Queen of England and Queen of Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called the Virgin Queen, Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty...
Songs (or 'The Elizas' as he called them) and the song-cycles
Ludlow and Teme and
The Western Playland, both settings of poetry by
A. E. HousmanAlfred Edward Housman , usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems were mostly written before 1900...
. Gurney was "a lover and maker of beauty", as it said on his gravestone (now replaced after it was damaged -- the original stone now stored inside Twigworth church), and there is something of
SchubertFranz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...
and
SchumannRobert Schumann, sometimes given as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic...
, but considerably less of the prevailing folk idiom of the time, in the intensity of his musical language.
Gurney is known both as a poet and composer and his reputation in both arts has continued to rise. Edmund Blunden, at the urging of composer
Gerald FinziGerald Raphael Finzi was a British composer. Finzi is best-known as a song-writer, but also wrote in other genres...
, assembled the first collection of Gurney's poetry which was published in 1954. This was followed by
P. J. KavanaghPatrick J. Kavanagh is an English poet, lecturer, actor and broadcaster. His father was the ITMA scriptwriter, Ted Kavanagh.In 1966, his memoir The Perfect Stranger won the Richard Hillary Prize....
's
Collected Poems, first published in 1982 and reissued in 2004. It remains the best edition of Gurney's poetry. Gurney is regarded as one of the great World War I poets, and like the others of them, such as
Edward ThomasPhilip Edward Thomas was an Anglo-Welsh poet and journalist. He is commonly considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences...
whom he admired, he often contrasted the horrors of the front line with the beauty and tranquillity of his native English landscape.
On 11 November 1985, Gurney was among 16
Great War PoetsThe term war poet came into currency during and after World War I. A number of poets writing in English had been soldiers, and had written about their experiences of war. Quite a number had died, most famously Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and Charles Sorley...
commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in
Westminster AbbeyThe Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, which is almost always referred to popularly and informally as Westminster Abbey, is a large, mainly Gothic church, in Westminster, London, just to the west of the Palace of Westminster...
's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow Great War poet,
Wilfred OwenWilfred Edward Salter Owen MC was an English and Welsh poet and soldier, regarded by many as one of the leading poets of the First World War...
. It reads:
"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
Sources
- Pamela Blevins, "Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty", The Boydell Press, 2008—the first biography of Gurney in 30 years and the only biography of Marion Scott.
- Pamela Blevins, "New Perspectives on Ivor Gurney's Mental Illness", The Ivor Gurney Society Journal, Volume 6, 2000, pp,29-58.
- Pamela Blevins, "One Last Chance: Dr. Randolph Davis and Ivor Gurney", The Ivor Gurney Society Journal, Volume 9, 2003, pp. 91-99.
External links