Ivor Gurney

Ivor Bertie Gurney was an English poet and composer. Born and raised in Gloucester, he suffered from bipolar 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. Gurney himself thought of music as his true vocation: “The brighter visions brought music; the fainter verse”.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Ivor Gurney.

From the period sources

Ivor Gurney, an English composer born in Gloucester in 1890, was a pupil of A. H. Brewer and studied at the Royal College, London, according to The New Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (1924). His compositional output included an orchestral rhapsody titled Gloucestershire, a piano-quintet, and two string-quartets. He also wrote two violin-sonatas and several vocal works, notably the songs with orchestra By a Bier-side and In Flanders, along with the song-cycle A Shropshire Lad and over fifty other songs. Beyond his musical endeavors, Gurney was also recognized as a writer of “fine lyric poems,” as noted in the same 1924 encyclopedia.