England produces lots of wimpy art-song cycles, and even the best ones, like Vaughan William’s On Wenlock Edge, seem a bit cutesy-poo. You can’t say this about Ivor Gurney’s cycles The Western Playground and Ludlow and Teme. They both have a definite “edge”. These are settings of A.E. Housman, like V.W.’s Wenlock, but much more like Schubert lieder in design. Gurney was himself a poet of considerable power, whose work, much of it written on the battle-front in WWI, is presently being rediscovered. Gurney’s life was tragic. At fifteen, he was already a very promising composer. Within a few years, he was on the war front, being wounded and gassed. His poetry from the period was published as, Severn and Somme (1917) and War’s Embers After the war, he began studies with Vaughan Williams, but by 1922 was committed to a mental asylum for what would now be diagnosed as extreme bi-polar disorder. The last third of his life was lived in institutions, and he died in 1937. Oddly, he only once set his own verse to music. His grave, in the small village of Twigworth, Gloucestershire, reads “a lover and maker of beauty”. (1919).
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