The Rightness of Gurney

RODERIC DUNNETT continues his examination
of Ivor Gurney the musician

 << Continued from page 3 

Yet, even where he prepares us, Gurney manages to surprise. Take that phrase 'buy bags of cherries' once more. In that it follows logically and thematically from what precedes, it's musically no surprise at all. But psychologically it's a different matter. Set over a chord of C major -- and doubly so given the second inversion (with G in the bass) -- that arching up to an F sharp feels like something extra: something overweening, a reaching up on tiptoe to grasp something just out of reach.

Thereupon it stretches further still, for after two more urgent, frustrated attempts in the following bar Gurney finally hits, for a tantalising split-second only in the triplets of the piano part, an elusive G no sooner touched than gone: for despite the added expectancy of a passing allargando (pull-up), that G is merely alluded to, a momentary illusion. A settling onto G major is simply not on offer; and by a sleight of hand, Gurney reverts to E minor, briefly traversing B minor to sow the seeds of his will-o'-the-wisps' E major final evanescence.

That kind of 'reaching beyond', where Gurney seems to take a vocal line and stretch it, hypertension it as it were, just a degree or so further than one expects or anticipates, is one of the most expressive characteristics of his melodic writing -- one of the classic Gurney 'signatures'. It recalls the metric trick termed, in Roman poetry, 'hypermetric' -- the device by which Virgil, in a Latin hexameter, will allow a line where the excitement is bubbling up to burst out and override all metric rules -- a pot boiling over; a stream breaking its banks; a messenger blurting out some breathless piece of news; any spillage of overpowering emotion.

This deliberately tensioned, augmented, outstretched, 'reaching out' effect occurs time and again in Gurney: not always in the same precise form, or on the same degree of the scale. In other composers of his day, or on the continent, such tensioning might stem from a measure of bitonality; and indeed, some form of tonal or modal ambivalence often holds the key to such evocative moments in Gurney.

But with him the phenomenon generally involves a sort of stretching of the melodic line itself. Sometimes it is merely a passing inflexion. Always it has a strong emotional import. The way he reaches to an E flat ('dream'), then an F ('thence'), then a G ('powers') in the first verse of 'Sleep' (version for high voice) is a classic example; yet even so, the real emotional high point is held off till verse two. And the way he coils there to reach up for that vital, liberating word 'joys', not now to a G, but to an A flat, is perhaps the surpassing example of this kind of surge, or climactic tensioning, in Gurney.

It can take other forms. It's there in 'Ha'nacker Mill' (Songs 1, p.25, bar 12) in the craning up of the voice to an E natural ('calling aloud'), a classic example of Gurney tensioning to evoke Angst [30].

It is tonal ambivalence that gives to that E natural in 'An Epitaph' ('I think she was') its tensioned, upward-reaching, almost fulfilled feel: an implied ninth, even a major sixth, can, through tonal context, acquire in Gurney an emotional pull almost disproportionate to the notes involved. But it is his subliminal echo, an octave higher, of the beautiful lady herself (the E-D of the vocal part in bars six and seven; see the example above) that perhaps lends what seems a mere passing musical figure such unusual added pathos here.

The high E flat at bar nine of Robert Bridges' 'Thou didst delight mine eyes' (Songs 3, p.27: 'Nor this the only time') is not dissimilar. Nor, in like key (D flat minor) the fifth and sixth bars ('matched by a lovely brown') of 'Brown is my Love' (Songs 4, p.4), typically taken a step further in the idyllising second verse variant ('Dainty white lillies'). No less does the self-mocking little pirouette of 'Down by the Salley Gardens' ('being young and foolish': the realisation of missed opportunity) speak reams; while that bizarre, almost mock-baroque turn in the hectic and effervescent 'Bread and Cherries' damned near bursts the bag.

These last count amongst Gurney's spryest, crispest, most ingenious songs. His best stands up to the best: consciously or no -- and his instinct is superlative -- he simply has the knack. I can think of no comparably succinct way of rounding off this survey except perhaps to instance another: might not the spirited, skittish Herrick setting 'To Violets' (Songs 4, pp.14-15) almost pass as a sixth 'Eliza'?