Ivor Gurney | |
|---|---|
 Portrait photograph of Gurney in hisGloucestershire Regimental uniformc. 1915 | |
| Born | Ivor Bertie Gurney (1890-08-28)28 August 1890 Gloucester, United Kingdom |
| Died | 26 December 1937(1937-12-26) (aged 47) |
| Resting place | St Matthew's Church,Twigworth |
| Monuments |
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| Nationality | English |
| Education | The King's School, Gloucester |
| Alma mater | Royal College of Music |
| Occupation(s) | Composer, poet, organist, soldier |
Ivor Bertie Gurney (28 August 1890 – 26 December 1937) was an English poet andcomposer, particularly of songs. He was born and raised inGloucester. He suffered frombipolar disorder through much of his life and spent his last 15 years in psychiatric hospitals. Critical evaluation of Gurney has been complicated by this, and also by the need to assess both his poetry and his music.[1] Gurney himself thought of music as his true vocation: "The brighter visions brought music; the fainter verse".[2]
Ivor Gurney was born at 3 Queen Street,Gloucester, in 1890, as the second of four surviving children of David Gurney, a tailor, and his wife Florence, a seamstress.[3]
He showed musical ability at an early age. He sang as a chorister atGloucester Cathedral from 1900 to 1906, when he became anarticled pupil ofHerbert Brewer at the cathedral. There he met fellow composerHerbert Howells, who became a lifelong friend. Alongside Gurney and Howells, Brewer's third pupil at this time wasIvor Novello, then known as Ivor Davies. He also enjoyed an enduring friendship with the poetF. W. Harvey, whom he met in 1908.
The adults of most significance in Gurney's early life were the Rev. Alfred H. Cheesman, and two sisters, Emily and Margaret Hunt, who nurtured Gurney's interests in music and literature. Gurney began composing music at the age of 14,[4] and won a scholarship to theRoyal College of Music in 1911. He studied there withCharles Villiers Stanford, who also taughtRalph Vaughan Williams,John Ireland,Marion Scott,Rebecca Clarke,Frank Bridge,Arthur Bliss,Herbert Howells and many others. Stanford told Howells that Gurney was potentially "the biggest of them all", but he was "unteachable".[5]
Gurney possessed a dynamic personality, but he had been troubled bymood swings that became apparent during his teenage years. He had a difficult time focusing on his work at college and suffered his firstbreakdown in 1913.[6] After taking a rest, he seemed to recover and returned to college.
Gurney's studies were interrupted byWorld War I, when he enlisted as a private soldier in theGloucestershire Regiment in February 1915. At the front, he began writing poetry seriously, sending his efforts to his friend, the musicologist and critic Marion Scott, who worked with Gurney as his editor and business manager. He was in the midst of writing the poems for what would become his first book,Severn and Somme, when he was wounded in the shoulder in April 1917. He recovered and returned to battle, still working on his book and composing music, including the songs "In Flanders" and "By A Bierside".Sidgwick & Jackson acceptedSevern and Somme in July, with publication set for the autumn. In the meantime, Gurney wasgassed in September the same year and sent to theEdinburgh War Hospital, where he met and fell in love with aVAD nurse, Annie Nelson Drummond, but the relationship later broke down.
There remains some controversy about the possible effects of the gas on his mental health, even though Gurney had clearly shown signs and symptoms of abipolar disorder since his teens.[7] "Being gassed (mildly) [his parenthesis] with the new gas is no worse than catarrh or a bad cold," Gurney wrote in a letter to Marion Scott on 17 September 1917. After his release from hospital, he was posted toSeaton Delaval, a mining village inNorthumberland, where he wrote poems, including "Lying Awake in the Ward". His volumeSevern and Somme was published in November 1917.
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In March 1918, Gurney suffered a serious mental breakdown, triggered at least in part by the sudden ending of his relationship with Drummond.[7][8] He was hospitalised in the Gallery Ward atBrancepeth Castle, County Durham, where he wrote several songs, despite the piano sounding, he said, like "a boiler factory in full swing because of the stone walls".[9] In June he threatened suicide, but he did not attempt it.
Gurney slowly regained some of his emotional stability and in October was honourably discharged from the army. Gurney received an unconventional diagnosis of nervous breakdown from "deferred"shell shock.[6] The notion that Gurney's instability should primarily be attributed to "shell shock" was perpetuated by Marion Scott, who used this term in the initial press releases after Gurney's death, as well as in his entry forGrove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Gurney seemed to thrive after the war and was regarded as one of the most promising men of his generation, but his mental distress continued to worsen.[7] He studied for a brief time withRalph Vaughan Williams upon returning to the Royal College of Music, but he withdrew from the college before completing his studies. His second volume of poetry,War's Embers, appeared in May 1919 to mixed reviews. He continued to compose, producing a large number of songs, instrumental pieces, chamber music, and two works for orchestra:War Elegy (1920) andA Gloucestershire Rhapsody (1919–1921). His music was being performed and published. However, by 1922, his condition had deteriorated to the point where his family had himdeclared insane.
It has been speculated that Gurney's mental problems may have resulted fromsyphilis, contracted either while he was a music student before the war, or perhaps while serving as a soldier in France. Blevins, Gurney's biographer, however, concludes that he did not suffer from syphilis. The issue has also been discussed, more recently, by Cambridge academic and broadcasterKate Kennedy.[10]
Gurney spent the last 15 years of his life inpsychiatric hospitals, first for a short period atBarnwood House in Gloucester, and then at theCity of London Mental Hospital,Dartford, where he was diagnosed as suffering from "delusional insanity (systematised)".[11] Gurney wrote prolifically during the asylum years, producing some eight collections of verse. His output included two plays inShakespearean style –Gloucester Play (1926) andThe Tewkesbury Trial (1926).[12] During this time he appeared to believe himself to be William Shakespeare in person. He continued also to compose music but to a far lesser degree. An examination of his archive suggests that up to two-thirds of his musical output remains unpublished and unrecorded.[13]
By the 1930s Gurney wrote little of anything, although he was described by Scott as being "so sane in his insanity".
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Gurney died oftuberculosis while still a patient at the City of London Mental Hospital, shortly before dawn on 26 December 1937, aged 47. He was buried inTwigworth, near Gloucester. The service was conducted by his godfather, Rev. Alfred Cheesman. Gurney was "a lover and maker of beauty", it was stated on his gravestone. (The stone was replaced after it was damaged – the original is now stored inside Twigworth church.) Marion Scott preserved Gurney's manuscripts and letters and worked with composerGerald Finzi to ensure that his legacy should not be forgotten.
On 11 November 1985, Gurney was among 16Great War Poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled inWestminster Abbey'sPoet's Corner.[14] The inscription on the stone was taken fromWilfred Owen's "Preface" to his poems and reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
In 2000, astained-glass window was installed inSt Mary de Lode Church, Gloucester and dedicated to the memory of Ivor Gurney.[15] A memorial to Gurney was erected in 2009Sint-Juliaan, nearYpres, close to the spot where he was the victim of amustard gas attack in 1917.[16][17]
A sculpture byWolfgang Buttress entitledThe Candle was unveiled in 2011 in Victoria Dock,Gloucester Docks; it is inscribed with lines from Gurney's poem "Requiem" around the base.[18][19] There is also ablue plaque memorial to Gurney in Eastgate Street, Gloucester.[20]
In April 2014,BBC Four broadcast a documentary about Gurney, entitledThe Poet Who Loved the War, presented byTim Kendall, which focused on how the First World War had in some ways helped Gurney through the periods of depression he suffered and helped him become one of the war's foremost poets.[21]
In June and July 2014 Gurney was the subject ofBBC Radio 3'sComposer of the Week, with contributions byKate Kennedy and featuring a number of first recordings made by the BBC especially for the programme.[13] In 2021 Kennedy publishedIvor Gurney: Dweller in Shadows, claimed to be "the first comprehensive biography" of Gurney.[22]The first comprehensive biography of Gurney to appear after Michael Hurd's 1978 biography wasIvor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty by Pamela Blevins, The Boydell Press, 2008.
Gurney wrote hundreds of poems and more than 300 songs but only set a handful of his own poems to music, the best-known of those being "Severn Meadows". TheFive Elizabethan Songs (or 'The Elizas' as he called them) were written in 1913-14 while he was still a student at the Royal College of Music, and published in 1920 by Winthrop Rogers. The song cyclesLudlow and Teme (published 1923) andThe Western Playland, (published 1926), both settings of poetry byA. E. Housman, were prepared for publication with the help of admirers and friends, including Gerald Finzi and his wifeJoy,Howard Ferguson and Marion Scott.[23] Oxford University Press issued two sets of ten songs in 1938, a year after his death, selected and edited by Finzi and Ferguson. Three further sets of ten songs came out in 1952, 1959 and 1979.
Gurney set to music many of the poems of his contemporaries, including at least nineteen poems written byEdward Thomas (six of them collected in the orchestral song cycleLights Out published in 1926), at least seven byW. H. Davies and five byRupert Brooke.[24] All of Gurney's settings from the Canadian poetBliss Carman'sSappho: One Hundred Lyrics (1904) were gathered inSeven Sappho Songs by Richard Carder in 1998.[25][26]
It has been suggested that there is something ofSchubert andSchumann, but considerably less of the prevailing folk idiom of the time, in the intensity of Gurney's musical language. He had a preference for setting dark ballads, as Schubert,Loewe andBrahms had before him, and "knew his Brahms and Schumann backwards, as his piano pieces testify".[27] But where he does lean towards folksong, as in his setting ofBelloc's "Ha’nacker Mill", it is often hard to tell whether the melody is original or traditional.[28]
Gurney's instrumental and chamber music is only now coming to light.[29] An exception are theFive Preludes for piano, which were written in 1919-20 and published the following year.[30] But he also wrote four piano sonatas and as many as 20 string quartets, most of which have been lost. Three of the piano sonatas (No. 2 incomplete) have been recorded by George Rowley.[31] The String Quartet in D minor, composed in 1924, received its premiere recording in 2020.[32] There are also two violin sonatas, in E-flat major and in D major, both dating from 1918/19 and both now recorded.[33]
Edmund Blunden, at the urging of Gerald Finzi, assembled the first collection of Gurney's poetry which was published in 1954. This was followed byP. J. Kavanagh'sCollected Poems, first published in 1982 and reissued in 2004. It remains the most comprehensive edition of Gurney's poetry. Gurney is regarded as one of the greatWorld War I poets, and like others of them, such asEdward Thomas, whom he admired, he often contrasted the horrors of the front line with the beauty and tranquillity of his native English landscape – these themes were explored in the 2012 musical playA Soldier and a Maker.
Deliberately unrhetorical in his poetic tone,[34] and writing as a ranker, not an officer,[35] Gurney offered a complex, wry, unheroic view of the soldierly world of theWestern Front:[36] presenting not a large statement (for or against war), but an individual experience.[37] Without diminishing the horrors of the front line, Gurney's poems often emphasise the moments of relief. "On Rest" was above all what he called "the relief of knowing mere being".[38] By detailing the "small trifles" of trench life[39] – moments of comradeship, letters from home, singsongs, bread andFray Bentos corned beef, wine, chocolate and café-au-lait[40] Gurney was able (in Blunden's words) to "express part of the Western Front secret... with distinctive, intimate and imaginative quickness."[41] In so far as he had a "manifesto", it was to present "the protest of the physical against the exalted spiritual; of the cumulative weight of small facts against the one large".[42]
At the same time, Gurney was something of a local poet, rooted inGloucester and its surroundings, which remained a touchstone of reality for him, in the front line and later in the asylum.[43] In the preface to his first book, he wrote of "my county, Gloucester, that whether I live or die stays always with me."[44] His tribute poem "Crickley Hill" was described byEdna Longley as "perhaps Gurney's most rapturous expression of local patriotism".[45]
The following poems provide an introduction to his work:
Collections:Ludlow and Teme (1923)LT;Lights Out (1926)LO;The Western Playland (1926)WP;A First Volume of Ten Songs (1938)T1;A Second Volume of Ten Songs (1938)T2;A Third Volume of Ten Songs (1952)T3;A Fourth Volume of Ten Songs (1959)T4;A Fifth Volume of Ten Songs (1979)T5;Seven Sappho Songs (1998)SS
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