1890–1937 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) was a British composer and poet from Gloucester. He wrote more than three hundred songs, some of them to poems by his contemporaries, as well as piano pieces and chamber music. He spent the last fifteen years of his life in psychiatric hospitals. The site offers his songs for voice and piano.
Ivor Gurney was born on 28 August 1890 in Gloucester, at 3 Queen Street. He was the second of four surviving children: his father, David Gurney, was a tailor and his mother, Florence, a seamstress.
From 1900 to 1906 Gurney sang as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral, and then became a pupil of Herbert Brewer. Brewer's pupils included, besides Gurney, Herbert Howells, with whom he became close friends for life. The third was Ivor Novello, who went by the name Ivor Davies back then. In 1908 Gurney met the poet F. W. Harvey, and that friendship, too, lasted a long time.
Among the adults around the young Gurney, two stood out: the Rev. Alfred H. Cheesman, and the sisters Emily and Margaret Hunt. They fostered his love of music and books. He wrote his first music at fourteen, and in 1911 a scholarship took him to the Royal College of Music.
At the college Gurney studied with Charles Villiers Stanford. Among Stanford's pupils were also Arthur Bliss, Frank Bridge, Rebecca Clarke, Marion Scott, Herbert Howells, John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams. In Stanford's class Gurney conceived a wish to write a cycle of operas based on the plays of William Yeats.
Studying was hard: since his teens Gurney had been plagued by mood swings, and in class he found it difficult to concentrate. During his studies he suffered a nervous breakdown; after a rest he seemed better and returned to the college. Even so, he managed to write and publish the pieces needed to complete the first year.
In those years he got to know Marion Scott, a violinist and musicologist. She would handle his publishing and business affairs and remain a devoted friend.
In February 1915, during the First World War, Gurney left his studies and enlisted as a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment, in its fifth battalion. After brief training he went to France as a signaller. At the front he began to write poetry in earnest and went on composing: he hired pianos in villages ruined by the war and sent his work on to Marion Scott. His songs of this time include “In Flanders” and “By A Bierside”.
In late 1916 the regiment was moved to the Somme, and in the spring of 1917 to Vermand, where Gurney was wounded. At that time he was working on the poems for his first book, Severn and Somme. In July 1917 the publisher Sidgwick & Jackson accepted the book, and in September Gurney was gassed and sent to the rear for treatment. The volume came out in November 1917.
Following the gas attack, Gurney was a patient at the Edinburgh War Hospital. A volunteer nurse there, Annie Nelson Drummond, won his love, though the relationship eventually ended. When he left, he was sent to Seaton Delaval in Northumberland, a village of miners, where he went on writing poems.
In 1918 his mental condition grew worse, and he was treated in military hospitals. In October 1918 Gurney was honourably discharged from the army and returned to the Royal College, where he began to study with Ralph Vaughan Williams.
His second book of verse, War's Embers, came out in May 1919 to mixed reviews. He kept on composing: songs in quantity, pieces for instruments, chamber music, and a pair of orchestral pieces: A Gloucestershire Rhapsody (1919–1921) and War Elegy (1920). His music was performed and printed.
After the war Gurney seemed to flourish and was counted among the most promising men of his generation, yet his inner distress kept growing. At different times he worked in a tax office and on a farm. By 1922 he had been declared insane.
In 1922 Gurney was admitted first, for a short time, to Barnwood House in Gloucester, and afterwards to the City of London Mental Hospital at Dartford. He spent the last fifteen years of his life in hospitals. During these years he wrote a great deal of poetry, roughly eight collections, and two plays in the manner of Shakespeare, Gloucester Play and The Tewkesbury Trial, both dated 1926. Music still came, though in far smaller quantity. By the 1930s he was writing next to nothing.
Gurney's death came shortly before dawn on 26 December 1937, from tuberculosis, at the age of 47; he was still in hospital at Dartford. His burial took place at Twigworth, close to Gloucester, with his godfather, the Rev. Alfred Cheesman, leading the service. The headstone was later replaced after being damaged, and the original is kept inside Twigworth church.
It was Marion Scott who kept Gurney's manuscripts and letters safe; together with the composer Gerald Finzi she saw to it that he was not forgotten. Oxford University Press brought out two volumes of ten songs each in 1938, chosen and edited by Finzi and Howard Ferguson, followed by three further volumes in 1952, 1959 and 1979. The first collection of his poems, put together by Edmund Blunden, appeared in 1954, and Collected Poems edited by P. J. Kavanagh in 1982.
Friends and admirers helped to ready the cycles Ludlow and Teme and The Western Playland for publication; among them Marion Scott, Howard Ferguson, Gerald Finzi and Finzi's wife Joy. In 1998 Richard Carder collected under the title Seven Sappho Songs every setting Gurney made from a book of lyrics by the Canadian poet Bliss Carman.
On 11 November 1985 a stone in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey honoured sixteen poets of the Great War, Gurney among them. A stained-glass window in his memory was put in at the church of St Mary de Lode, Gloucester, in 2000. In 2009 a memorial to him was raised at Sint-Juliaan near Ypres, close to where he was gassed in 1917. In 2011 Wolfgang Buttress's sculpture The Candle was set up at Gloucester Docks, with lines from Gurney's poem “Requiem” around its base, and Eastgate Street in Gloucester has a blue plaque for Gurney.
Gurney's life has been told in several books: Michael Hurd's biography (1978), Pamela Blevins's study of Gurney and Marion Scott (2008) and Kate Kennedy's Dweller in Shadows (2021). A musical play, A Soldier and a Maker, took up his themes in 2012. BBC Four screened a documentary about him in April 2014, The Poet Who Loved the War, with Tim Kendall as presenter, and that June and July he was the subject of Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3.
Gurney produced hundreds of poems and over three hundred songs, yet only a few songs use his own verse; “Severn Meadows” is the best known. Five Elizabethan Songs, his cycle nicknamed “The Elizas”, dates from 1913–1914, when he was a Royal College of Music student; it reached print in 1920. Two cycles set poems by A. E. Housman: The Western Playland (1926) and Ludlow and Teme, which was published in 1923.
He also set poems by his contemporaries: at least nineteen by Edward Thomas, six of which form the orchestral cycle Lights Out (published 1926), while W. H. Davies supplied him with at least seven texts and Rupert Brooke with five. One suggestion is that his intense musical language has echoes of Schubert and Schumann but much less of the folk style then in fashion. Dark ballads were his preferred texts.
Much of his instrumental and chamber music is only now emerging. The best-known exception is Five Preludes for piano (1919–1920, printed the next year). Four piano sonatas and up to twenty string quartets were written, though most are lost. The String Quartet in D minor (1924) had its first recording in 2020; two violin sonatas, both from 1918–1919, have also been recorded.
Gurney is known as a poet as well. His war poems do not make a grand statement for or against war but convey one person's experience: beside the horrors of the front line they find room for the small things of trench life, such as comradeship, letters from home, songs and food, and for the beauty of the English countryside he came from. Gloucester and its surroundings remained a point of support for Gurney, at the front and later in hospital. Gurney himself regarded music as his true calling.
The site offers Gurney's songs for voice and piano: “Under the Greenwood Tree” (words by William Shakespeare) and “I will go with my father a-ploughing” (level “Middle+”), and “Orpheus”, “Tears”, “Spring” and “Sleep” (level “Advanced”). The first two are the place to begin.