Ernest John Moeran

Ernest John Moeran was an English composer who had strong associations with Ireland.

Moeran was born in Heston (now in the London Borough of Hounslow), the son of the Rev Joseph William Wright Moeran, an Irish-born clergyman, and his wife Ada Esther (born Whall). The family moved around for several years as his father was appointed to various parishes but they eventually settled in Bacton, on the coast of Norfolk.

Moeran studied the violin and the piano as a child. He was educated from an early age at home, by a governess. At the age of ten, he was sent to Suffield Park Preparatory School in Cromer, North Norfolk. In 1908, he was enrolled at Uppingham School where he spent the next five years. He was taught music by the director Robert Sterndale Bennett (grandson of Sir William Sterndale Bennett), who greatly encouraged his talents. On leaving Uppingham in 1913, he studied piano and composition at the Royal College of Music with Charles Villiers Stanford. He was also a member of the prestigious Oxford & Cambridge Musical Club.

When war broke out Moeran enlisted in the Norfolk Regiment, in which he was later commissioned. In 1917 Moeran went to France, where he was attached to the West Yorkshire Regiment, and wounded at Bullecourt on 3 May. His army records refer to a 'small gunshot wound' to the side of the neck, and a piece of shrapnel in his back, later removed. By the middle of August Moeran was declared 'free from any inconveniences' by a medical board and seconded to the Bedfordshire Regiment, at this time on garrison duty in Ireland around Boyle and County Roscommon. It was here that Moeran came to be bewitched by the Irish landscape which would later inform many of his best compositions. In October 1918 he tried out for the newly formed Royal Air Force, but after two months was returned to a reserve battalion of the Norfolk Regiment, and discharged in January 1919.

After the war he returned for a few months to Uppingham School, where he was employed as a teacher of music. This role did not satisfy him and he returned to the Royal College of Music to resume his composition studies, now with John Ireland, who had been a pupil of Moeran's earlier teacher Charles Villiers Stanford.

His first mature compositions, songs and chamber music, date from this time. He also began collecting and arranging folk music of Norfolk and other regions. He collected about 150 folk songs in Norfolk and Suffolk. His preferred method was to sit in a country pub and wait until an old man started singing. He noted the song down and then asked for more. According to the biography The Music of E. J. Moeran by Geoffrey Self (1986), he spent time living with gypsies, but no further details are available. He spent some time after the war living at Kington, Herefordshire.

By the mid-1920s, Moeran had become close friends with Peter Warlock and they lived for some years in Eynsford, Kent, notorious among the locals for their frequent drunken revelry. For the rest of his life, Moeran had problems with alcohol, later joined by mental instability. After Warlock's death in 1930, Moeran became interested in his Irish roots and began spending much of his time in Kenmare, County Kerry.

As a person, E. J. Moeran was greatly influenced by a number of people. However, it was the time spent with Peter Warlock in Eynsford that had the greatest impact on his life. While Warlock was seemingly capable of drinking alcohol to excess without any apparent long-term effects, Moeran developed a dependency which handicapped him for the remainder of his life. His later problems have been attributed to his war wound to the head, but this is incorrect. By 1930, Moeran had become an alcoholic.

Although English and middle-class, Moeran was at ease in a bar surrounded by local characters from local farms. Indeed, until 2007, "Moeran's Bar" at the hotel in Kenmare where he lived was named after him. He was looked on with affection by all who knew him, and his gauche, bumbling personality belied a very sharp-witted character who was quick to learn and take up new approaches to music. He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of trains and train timetables.

He married the cellist Peers Coetmore on 26 July 1945 and inspired two of Moeran's finest late works, the Cello Concerto and Cello Sonata. He died suddenly in 1950 at the age of 55. He was found in the Kenmare River and it was at first assumed he had drowned. However, an inquest later established that he had died before falling into the water.