Gurney: Ludlow and Teme (for tenor, string quartet, and piano, 1919/25)
When smoke stood up from Ludlow
Far in a western brookland
‘Tis time I think
Ludlow Fair
On the idle hill of summer
When I was one and twenty
The Lent Lily
Ivor Gurney was born in Gloucester on 28 August 1890, and became a chorister in the cathedral ten years later. There followed in 1911 a scholarship to study with Stanford at the Royal College of Music, then wartime service in France – from where he warned Vaughan Williams (with whom he was later to study) that, apropos of On Wenlock Edge and A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, “Such precise and measured verses are too easy to set….”! He did not escape the trenches without injury or trauma – which may or may not have hastened his mental decline to the point of threatened suicide, resulting in admission into Barnwood House in Gloucester, and thence to the City of London Mental Hospital, where he eventually died of consumption. His close friend and fellow student, Herbert Howells, told me more than once that he regarded Gurney as the most gifted of all the composers of that generation – gifts which also flowered in outpourings of poetry (commemorated in Westminster Abbey‘s Poets’ Corner) in addition to hundreds of songs.
It could be claimed that Ludlow and Teme originated in a performance of On Wenlock Edge in November 1919, since Gurney immediately began his own setting of selections from A Shropshire Lad. After its first performance – in March 1920 – the writer Marion Scott (familiar in the mid 20th century for her Master Musicians book on Beethoven) reported that the song-cycle “had a spontaneous success. No composer being forthcoming in spite of repeated calls for him, Gurney was sought, and at length found, bashfully hiding behind the big bookcase at the far end of the back drawing room [in her own home]”. There quickly followed another Housman cycle for the same instrumental combination (but with baritone voice), The Western Playland, which in turn was succeeded in 1925 by settings of Whitman and R L Stevenson. Around this time he heard from Marion Scott that Ludlow and Teme was to be broadcast by the BBC on 15 August, and so Gurney wrote to the soloist, Osmond Davies, that “Ivor Gurney writes saying he is so glad that Mr Davies is singing (to a wide audience) Ludlow and Teme, and from the praise given his voice by Miss Scott, it should do well. Wishes that it were the revised version… The alterations are simple (and striking). I wish Mr. Davies would make them.” He wrote in the manuscript of his revision: “Ludlow and Teme: Some instantly practicable – and also harder – suggested alternatives. Enormous improvement. Taking away of squareness”. Philip Lancaster has made a new performing edition of the work, incorporating both the original and the composer’s various revisions from 1925. He writes touchingly of Gurney’s achievement: “….epitomise a sensitivity to poetry unique to Gurney and in which Housman could perhaps be pleased to have found a fine interpreter: in his song settings he allows the poems to breathe and be sung and expressed in their own time without feeling restricted by the music – a poet’s sense, born of his dual ability as composer-poet”.
© Alan George
All Alan’s articles
