The John Ireland Trust

John Ireland (1879-1962) Photo: Jane Bown of The Observer

John Ireland was born in Bowden, near Manchester, England, in 1879. His parents were literary people and knew many writers of the day, including Emerson. Ireland entered the newly-established Royal College of Music in London at the age of thirteen, lost both his parents shortly after, and had to make his own way as an orphaned teenager, studying piano, organ and composition. The last was under Sir Charles Stanford who with his colleague Sir Hubert Parry taught many of the English composers who emerged at the end of the nineteenth century – Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Frank Bridge (who was born the same year as Ireland), Eugene Goossens, Arthur Bliss, Herbert Howells, George Butterworth and many others.

Ireland destroyed almost all of his student works and juvenilia (the beautiful Sextet for clarinet, horn and string quartet being one of the few works which he permitted to be published, and then only towards the end of his life) and emerged as a celebrated composer towards the end of World War I when his Second Violin Sonata brought him overnight fame. From then until his death in 1962 he led an outwardly uneventful life combining composition, teaching at the Royal College (where his pupils included Benjamin Britten and E J Moeran), and his position as organist and choirmaster at St Luke’s Church in Chelsea, London.

Ireland’s music belongs to the school of ‘English Impressionism’. Having been brought up on the German classics, notably Brahms, he was strongly influenced in his twenties and thirties by the music of Debussy, Ravel, and the early works of Stravinsky and Bartók. While many of his contemporaries such as Vaughan Williams and Holst developed a language strongly characteristic of English folksong, Ireland evolved a complex harmonic language closer to French and Russian models. Like Fauré he preferred the intimate forms of chamber music, song and piano music to the larger orchestral and choral canvasses. He wrote neither symphony (unlike his friend Arnold Bax who wrote seven) nor opera, and only one oratorio, These things shall be, but his Piano Concerto is one of the best, if not the best, to have been wrtten by an Englishman and is a work of intense emotion and nostalgic feeling.

Ireland was strongly influenced by poetry. His settings of such poets as A E Housman, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, John Masefield and Rupert Brooke are among the best known of his works. He was also highly susceptible to the spirit of place. He lived for many years in London’s Chelsea (Chelsea Reach is a depiction in the form of a barcarolle of that great sweep of the Thames as it passes along the Embankment to the west of the Houses of Parliament). He was also devoted to the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey. Their location between England and France must have seemed appropriate to his musical orientation, but more importantly he found there traces of prehistoric pagan ritual to which he had originally been drawn through the writings of the Welsh writer Arthur Machen. But perhaps his greatest love was for the English county of Sussex, a landscape of rolling downs and (in Ireland’s day) isolated villages, including Amberley who ‘Wild Brooks’ – streams coursing through fields – gave him the inspiration for perhaps the most brilliant of his piano pieces. Ireland eventually retired to Sussex in 1953 when he bought a converted windmill underneath the Downs.

Ireland’s music is intensely personal in style and has always attracted a devoted following among discerning music lovers. As well as his Piano Concerto, previously mentioned, works that continue to be frequently performed and recorded are A Downland Suite, Concertino Pastorale, Fantasy Sonata, The Holy Boy, A London Overture, Sea Fever, and his beautiful motet Greater love hath no man, to name but a few. His hymn tune ‘My Song is Love Unknown’ is sung in churches throughout the English-speaking world.

Some years after his death the John Ireland Trust was formed to promote awareness of Ireland’s music through recordings, performances and publications. Further information is available from The John Ireland Trust, 35 St Mary’s Mansions, St Mary’s Terrace, London W2 1SQ, England. Communications by email should be sent to .