Ivor (Bertie) Gurney

Composer and poet, born in Gloucester, Gloucestershire, SWC England, UK. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London. As a composer he found his voice in 1913/14 with the composition of Five Elizabethan Songs. Gassed and shell-shocked in 1917, he published two volumes of poems from hospital: Severn and Somme (1917) and War's Embers (1919). From 1922 he was confined in an asylum, and died in London. Some 300 songs and 900 poems survive, whose quality is increasingly recognized. In 1982 a major collection of his 300 poems was issued.

Ivor Gurney (August 28, 1890 - December 26, 1937) was an English composer and poet.

Born at 3 Queen Street, Gloucester in 1890, Gurney sang as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral, from 1900 to 1906 when he became an articled pupil of Dr Herbert Brewer at the cathedral. During this time he met two important friends, composer Herbert Howells, also a pupil of Brewer, and the future poet F. Gurney began composing music at the age of 14 and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1911. Stanford told Howells that Gurney was potentially "the biggest of them all", but he was "unteachable". Gurney's studies were interrupted by World War I where he was wounded in April 1917 and gassed in Septmeber the same year. After the war, Gurney returned to London to resume his music studies at the RCM with Vaughan Williams.

Gurney suffered from bipolar illness, which showed symptoms during his mid-teens and led to his first documented breakdown in 1913, followed by a major breakdown in the spring of 1918 while he was still in uniform. 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 died of tuberculosis in the City of London Mental Hospital on 26 December 1937 at the age of 47.

Gurney wrote hundreds of poems and more than 300 songs as well as instrumental music. Gurney was "a lover and maker of beauty", as it said on his gravestone (now replaced, and stored inside Twigworth church), 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.

Gurney is known both as a poet and composer and his reputation in both arts has continue to rise. Edmund Blunden, at the urging of composer Gerald Finzi, assembled the first collection of Gurney's poetry which was published in 1954. It 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.