By a bierside (1916)

Severn Meadows (1917)

In Flanders (1917)

Even such is time (1917)

Tarantella (after 1929)

On Wenlock edge (1917–18)

For composers, unlike poets, creative work at the front during the First World War was almost impossible. Ivor Gurney, a private soldier in the Gloucestershire Regiment – who survived the war only to spend the last 15 years of his life in a mental hospital – was one of the few who composed anything of value in those conditions. His creative energy was such that between August 1916 and June 1917 he was able to write four songs literally in the trenches. He was particularly proud of the first of them, By a bierside, composed in a disused trench-mortar emplacement at Laventie: ‘There was never anybody,’ he wote, ‘could have set the words “Death opens doors” as it is set here.’ If the Brahms echoes at this point are distracting, the consolation is in the voice floating over shifting harmonies in the preceding line – an example perhaps of the “strangeness” Gurney found in the song when he finally found a piano to play it on.

Severn Meadows, written at Coulaincourt in March 1917, is one of Gurney’s few settings of his own verse. A clear but unsentimental confession of homesickness, with its disconsolately wandering piano accompaniment, it is a close relation of his next song, In Flanders, to words by his Gloucestershire friend and fellow soldier F.W. Harvey. “Gloster itself shines and speaks in it,’’ he said of his setting. The last of the songs completed in the trenches, Even such is time, inspired by Sir Walter Raleigh’s farewell to life on the eve of his execution, is a contemplation of death more intimately expressed than that of By a bierside but no less moving for that.

Since Belloc’s Tarantella was written twenty years after he met Miranda Mackintosh at Canrac on the Aragon in 1909, Gurney’s setting (recently edited from the manuscript by Ian Venables) must be one of the last of his songs. It resists the temptation of a 6/8 moto perpetuo suggested by Belloc’s title but dances in its own metres while neither skipping over the details nor failng to find a new rhythm for its sober epilogue. Back in the trenches, On Wenlock Edge – a confidently striding Housman setting such as he might have written before the war – was conceived at Arras in June 1917 but completed at Seaton Delaval six months later, after the the composer had been returned to this country suffering from “shell shock.”