Moeran, E(rnest) J(ohn)

(b Heston, 31 Dec 1894; d nr Kenmare, Ireland, 1 Dec 1950). English composer of Anglo-Irish descent. He was the son of a Norfolk clergyman and was educated at Uppingham School, where he learnt the violin and played in a quartet. He entered the RCM in 1913, but after 18 months his studies were interrupted by World War I; he joined up as a despatch rider and was commissioned, but after being severely wounded in the head was declared unfit for further active service. On demobilization in 1919 he returned to his old school as music master, but he soon decided to continue his studies and worked under John Ireland until 1923.

It was after this period with Ireland that Moeran’s music began to receive public performances. The First Rhapsody for orchestra was played several times before it was given by the Hallé Orchestra in 1924 under Harty, and a series of his programmes was given at the Wigmore Hall in 1925. At this time his music was dominated by the influences of Ireland and of Delius, whose chromatic harmony was always to colour Moeran’s work, while his intimacy with the folksongs of his native East Anglia strongly affected his melodic style. Throughout the 1920s and early 30s Moeran concentrated on the smaller genres which seemed to suit his lyrical and harmonic gifts. Among the earliest and most attractive pieces of the period are the Three Piano Pieces, the Theme and Variations for piano, the String Quartet in A minor, the Piano Trio and the Violin Sonata. Although their gestures are broader, the two orchestral rhapsodies of 1922 and 1924 are loosely episodic, and it is significant that Moeran found himself unable to fulfil a commission from the Hallé Orchestra for a symphony in 1924.

Nevertheless, he had achieved considerable technical fluency, and the bounds of his style were firmly established when he wrote the String Trio (1931), his outstanding chamber work. That style places him definitively among his more eminent contemporaries: Delius, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Bax, Ireland and Warlock. Indeed, his music may be criticized as too reliant on the work of these composers, but Moeran’s individuality had continued to develop after the frankly Delian references of the Piano Trio. The influence of Warlock is still present in the Seven Poems of James Joyce (1929), among Moeran’s many early songs, written shortly after the period when he and Warlock shared a house in Eynsford. But if this stylistic dependence robs his work of a strong personal identity, such pieces as Whythorne’s Shadow (1931) and Lonely Waters (1932) have a distinctive quality that resides primarily in their characteristic harmony, although Moeran’s was but a limited area lying narrowly between Delius’s chromaticism as transformed by Warlock, and Vaughan Williams’s modality or, more importantly, his bimodality.

At this time Moeran retired to the Cotswolds, and set out to review his achievement and expand his style and technique. Although there was no immediate major change in his music, this period of self-criticism eventually produced a series of large-scale works, and his output of songs, piano pieces and chamber music was greatly reduced. The first fruit was the Symphony in G minor (1924–37), a remarkable accomplishment for a man who, until then, had conceived music lyrically, drawing heavily on his immediate responses to nature. Nature remained an important spur to his invention, and he stated that the symphony was imagined ‘among the mountains and seaboard of County Kerry’ and ‘around the sand-dunes and marshes of East Norfolk’ (Westrup) – a reflection of his twin heritage. But the symphony is far more than a record of his impressions of the landscape, and the time he took to complete it may indicate the struggle to change his approach to composition. The lyricism is still there, as in the first movement’s second subject, and themes in folksong style supply the basic material. However, Moeran was now capable of sustaining much wider spans, and his style extended to include vigorous fugato writing and a Sibelian thematic growth – the opening theme, for instance, is reconstituted at each appearance. Only in the finale does invention flag, and here the references to Sibelius are most overt. But the work has a strong vitality and nobility; the grandly proportioned first movement and the variegated textures of the Scherzo are possibly Moeran’s finest achievements. The Symphony was first performed in January 1938 under Leslie Howard.

This work encouraged Moeran to develop the energetic side of his character where previously he had dwelt upon wistful introverted moods. The outgoing quality was most brilliantly expressed in the Sinfonietta (1944), whose first and last movements are conceived in terms of sparkling virtuosity with vigorous contrapuntal writing and luminous orchestration. But before this piece Moeran completed a work which achieves a paradigmatic balance between poetic dreaming and dashing vitality: the Violin Concerto. Of its three movements, only the central rondo scherzo provides fully-worked, quick music, the outer movements sharing slow, meditative material. In 1945 Moeran composed the Cello Concerto for Peers Coetmore, whom he married in the same year. This concerto is a work of some grandeur, including an opening movement of majestic gloom and a vigorously intricate rondo finale, rich in material. His final orchestral work, the Serenade in G, includes elements of pastiche, which are not completely convincing although they are handled delightfully. This and the sombre Cello Sonata were the last major works Moeran was to complete: in December 1950 he was found dead in the River Kenmare, having fallen after a heart attack. He was then working on a Second Symphony and was probably going through another transitional stage, with bitonal elements becoming increasingly important.

Moeran occupied a minor place in the music of his time, but his meticulously polished and ready technique is unsurpassed among his British contemporaries. This craftsmanship is evident in the clarity of his textures and processes, and in the superb sonority of his orchestral writing.

WORKS

(selective list)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W.J. Mitson: ‘Moeran’, Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey Survey of Chamber Music (London, 1929–30, enlarged 2/1963/R by C. Mason)

H. Statham: ‘Moeran's Symphony in G minor’, MR, i (1940), 245–54

E. Evans: ‘Moeran's Violin Concerto’, MT, lxxxiv (1943), 233–4

J.A. Westrup: ‘E.J. Moeran’, British Music of our Time, ed. A.L. Bacharach (Harmondsworth, 1946), 175–84

H. Foss: Compositions of E.J. Moeran (London, 1948)

A. Bax: ‘E.J. Moeran 1894–1950’, ML, xxxii (1951), 125–7

H. Foss: ‘Ernest John Moeran’, MT, xcii (1951), 20–22

W. Mann: ‘Some English Concertos’, The Concerto, ed. R. Hill (Harmondsworth, 1952/R), 418–22

S. Wild: E.J. Moeran (London, 1973) [incl. introduction by P. Coetmore, comprehensive discography and bibliography]

R.J. McNeill: A Critical Study of the Life and Works of E.J. Moeran (diss., U. of Melbourne, 1982)

L. Hill: Lonely Waters: the Diary of a Friendship with E.J. Moeran (London, 1985)

G. Self: The Music of E.J. Moeran (London, 1986) [incl. preface by V. Handley, bibliography and work-list]

ANTHONY PAYNE