Ivor Gurney
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Ivor Gurney (August 28, 1890 - December 26, 1937) was an English composer and poet.
Born in Gloucester, Gurney sang as a chorister in Gloucester Cathedral, becoming friends with Herbert Howells there. He began composing music at the age of 14 and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1911. He studied there with Charles Villiers Stanford who also taught Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland and Arthur Bliss but thought that Gurney was potentially "the biggest of them all". Gurney's studies were interrupted by World War I where he was wounded and gassed. But his poetic gift also revealed itself at this time, resulting in two volumes of poetry, Severn and Somme (1917) and War's Embers (1919). After the war, Gurney returned to London to resume his music studies with Vaughan Williams.
Gurney suffered from his early adulthood from bipolar disorder, which resulted in a major breakdown in the spring of 1918 while he was still in uniform. He was never shell-shocked nor did he suffer from schizophrenia, the label often used to describe his illness. Although artistically he enjoyed a highly productive period after his discharge from the army, 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 Hospital, Dartford, where he eventually died of tuberculosis on 26 December 1937 at the age of 47. He continued to write poetry and a scattering of music, which was collected and preserved by his friend Marion Scott and later edited by Edmund Blunden, Gerald Finzi, and others.
Gurney wrote hundreds of poems and more than 300 songs and was, before his institutionalization, considered one of the most promising poets and musicians of his generation. He only ever set one of his own poems, Severn Meadows, to music. His best-known compositions are his five Elizabethan Songs (or The Elizas as he called them) and the song-cycles Ludlow and Teme and The Western Playland to lyrics by A. E. Housman. Gurney was "a lover and maker of beauty", as it says on his gravestone, and there is something of Schubert and Schumann, but considerably less of the prevailing folk idiom of the time, in the intensity of his musical language. He also wrote some instrumental music, primarily for the piano.
While Gurney is still best remembered as a composer, his reputation as a poet has been continually rising, especially after the publication of a Blunden edition of his poetry in 1954 which brought his name before the public again. P. J. Kavanagh's Collected Poems, first publised in 1982, remains the best edition of Gurney's poetry. Gurney is regarded as one of the great English World War I poets, and like the others of them, such as Edward Thomas whom he admired, he often contrasted the horrors of the front line with the beauty and tranquillity of his native English landscape.
References
External links
- The Ivor Gurney Society (http://www.geneva.edu/~dksmith/gurney/index.html)