It was only whilst serving in France that Gurney began to write poetry in earnest, serving his apprenticeship in the trenches and behind the lines. It was more difficult to write music, but he did compose a handful of songs.
By a bierside sets a poem that first appeared within John Masefield’s play,
The tragedy of Pompey the Great (1910), where it is spoken by four centurions, lamenting the death of a young Roman soldier. It was written in August 1916, whilst lying on a damp sandbag in a disused trench mortar emplacement. Gurney wrote at some length on the song, which begins as ‘a rhapsody on beauty, full of grief but not bitter, until the unreason of death closes the thought of loveliness, that Death unmakes. Then the heart grows bitter with the weight of grief and revelation of the impermanence of things … but, anger being futile, the mind turns to the old strangeness of the soul’s wandering apart from the body, and to what tremendous mysteries! And the dimly apprehended sense of such before us all overpowers the singer, who is lost in the glory of the adventure of Death.’ In another letter, he wrote that he imagined ‘some poet-priest pronouncing an oration over the dead body of some young Greek hero’. This description, and that of the soul ‘wandering apart from the body’, recall Elgar’s
Dream of Gerontius, and particularly the Priest’s parting declamation over the dying Gerontius—‘Proficiscere, anima Christiana’—which is echoed musically in Gurney’s declamatory setting of the words ‘It is most grand to die!’ Both
In Flanders and
By a bierside were orchestrated by Howells at the behest of Sir Charles Stanford, for performance at the Royal College of Music.
from notes by Philip Lancaster © 2018