Queer Places:
Rock Windmill, Rock Ln, Washington, Pulborough RH20 3BL, UK
St Mary, 24 Church Cl, Shipley, Horsham RH13 8PJ, UK
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John
Nicholson Ireland (13 August 1879 – 12 June 1962)[1] was
an English composer and teacher of music. He wrote songs to poems by A.
E. Housman, Thomas Hardy, Christina
Rossetti, John Masefield, Rupert
Brooke and others. In the wake of the posthumous denigration of
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, more or less contemporaneous with the disgrace of
Oscar Wilde in
1895, certain English composers developed a keepsake mentality, frustrated yet
potent, that came to characterize a generations music. Three representatives
may be considered: Roger Quilter,
John Ireland, and
George Butterworth. Butterworth was probably homosexual, Ireland and Quitter
certainly were. None of the three found a longterm or stable sexual partner.
All of them excelled at composing songs, inscribing fulfillment in the
perfection of the small-scale and containable while counterbalancing that with
the powerful erotic yearning of the English lyric poetry they chose to set to
music. In the twentieth century, in the wake of the first waves of homosexual
liberation movemens, composers became more open about their private lives. A
number of European composers were reputedly gay, including
Maurice Ravel,
Reynaldo Hahn,
Karol Szymanowski, and
Francis Poulenc; the
avant-garde had a huge share of gay composers, including
Wolfgang Fortner,
Hans Werner
Henze, Sylvano Bussotti,
Peter Maxwell Davies,
Karel Goeyvaerts,
Jean
Barraqué, Konrad Boehmer, and
Pierre Boulez. English composers who were
reputedly gay include Roger
Quilter,
John Ireland,
George Butterworth,
Arthur
Benjamin, Eugene Goosens, and
Noël Coward; two of the most important
English composers, Benjamin Britten and
Michael Tippett, both achieved
particular notoriety for being openly gay (although each handled it very
differently).
John Ireland was born in Bowdon, near Altrincham, Cheshire, into a family
of Scottish descent and some cultural distinction. His father, Alexander
Ireland, a publisher and newspaper proprietor, was aged 69 at John's birth.
John was the youngest of the five children from Alexander's second marriage
(his first wife had died). His mother, Annie Elizabeth Nicholson, was a
biographer and 30 years younger than Alexander. She died in October 1893, when
John was 14, and Alexander died the following year, when John was 15.[2] John
Ireland was described as "a self-critical, introspective man, haunted by
memories of a sad childhood".[3]
Ireland entered the Royal College of Music in 1893, studying piano
with Frederic Cliffe,[1] and
organ, his second study, under Walter Parratt.[4] From
1897 he studied composition under Charles Villiers Stanford.[1] In
1896 Ireland was appointed sub-organist at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street,
London, and later, from 1904 until 1926, was organist and choirmaster at St
Luke's Church, Chelsea.[5]
Ireland began to make his name in the early 1900s as a composer of songs and
chamber music. His Violin Sonata No. 1 of 1909 won first prize in an
international competition organised by the well-known patron of chamber
music W. W. Cobbett. Even more successful was his Violin Sonata No. 2:
completed in January 1917, he submitted this to a competition organised to
assist musicians in wartime. The jury included the violinist Albert
Sammons and the pianist William Murdoch, who together gave the work its first
performance at Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street on 6 March that year. As
Ireland recalled, "It was probably the first and only occasion when a British
composer was lifted from relative obscurity in a single night by a work cast
in a chamber-music medium." The work was enthusiastically reviewed, and the
publisher Winthrop Rogers offered immediate publication (the first edition was
sold out even before it had been processed by the printers). A subsequent
performance of the Violin Sonata by Ireland and the violinist Désiré
Defauw drew a packed audience to the Wigmore Hall in London.[6]
Ireland frequently visited the Channel Islands and was inspired by the
landscape. In 1912 he composed the piano piece The Island Spell (the first of
the three pieces in his set Decorations) while staying on Guernsey, and his
set of three pieces for piano Sarnia: An Island Sequence was written there in
1940. He was evacuated from the islands just before the German invasion during
World War II. From 1923 he taught at the Royal College of Music.[7] His
pupils there included Richard Arnell, Ernest John Moeran, Benjamin
Britten (who later described Ireland as possessing "a strong personality but a
weak character"),[8] composer Alan
Bush,[7] Geoffrey
Bush (no relation to Alan), who subsequently edited or arranged many of
Ireland's works for publication, and Anthony Bernard. John Ireland was a
lifelong bachelor, except for a brief interlude when, in quick succession, he
married, separated, and divorced. On 17 December 1926, aged 47, he married a
17-year pupil, Dorothy Phillips. This marriage was dissolved on 18 September
1928,[2] and
it is believed not to have been consummated.[9] He
took a similar interest in another young student, Helen Perkin (1909–1996), a
pianist and composer, to whom he dedicated both the Piano Concerto in E-flat
major and the Legend for piano and orchestra (which began life as a second
concerto). She gave the premiere performance of both works,[2] but
any thoughts he had for a deeper relationship with her came to nothing when
she married George Mountford Adie, a disciple of George Gurdjieff, and she
later moved with Adie to Australia.[10] Subsequently,
Ireland withdrew the dedications. In 1947 Ireland acquired a personal
assistant and companion, Mrs Norah Kirkby, who remained with him till his
death.[2] Despite
these associations with women, it is clear from his private papers that his
sexual proclivities lay elsewhere and many commentators support this view.[11][12]
On 10 September 1949, his 70th birthday was celebrated in a special Prom
concert, at which his Piano Concerto was played by Eileen Joyce,[13] who
was also the first pianist to record the concerto, in 1942. Ireland retired in
1953, settling in the hamlet of Rock in Sussex, where he lived in a converted
windmill for the rest of his life. It was there he met the young pianist Alan
Rowlands who would be Ireland's choice to record his complete piano music.[14]
He died of heart failure aged 82 at Rock Mill in Washington, Sussex,[15] and
is buried at St. Mary the Virgin in Shipley, near his home.[16][17] His
epitaph reads "Many waters cannot quench love" and "One of God's noblest works
lies here."
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