156 Morfydd Owen centenery
Elin Manahan Thomas, the
Gorseinon-born soprano, sang Handel’s
"Eternal source of light divine" at the recent Royal
Wedding.
On 2 July she will be singing
at the Gower Festival at
St Paul’s
Church in Sketty, where her subject will be the Welsh soprano, composer and
pianist Morfydd Owen, who died in Mumbles 100 years ago.
Morfydd Owen was born into a
Welsh-speaking family in 1891, and soon showed signs of being a musical
prodigy, playing the piano and beginning to compose even from the age of
six.
After performing in chapels and at
local eisteddfodau she studied at
University
College,
Cardiff,
and went on to
London’s
Royal Academy of Music, where she won every available prize at the end of her
first year.
She became a member of the Welsh
Presbyterian Chapel in
Charing
Cross Road, and began to move in influential
London Welsh circles.
She collaborated
with the wife of Liberal MP Herbert Lewis to transcribe and arrange Welsh folk songs.
Admitted to the Gorsedd of Bards at the 1912
National Eisteddfod at Wrexham, she took the Bardic name Llwyn, being often
known as Morfydd Llwyn-Owen.
While living
in Hampstead she also moved in a very different sphere, meeting writers in
Bohemian circles like D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, and forming a lifelong
friendship with Liberal MP and writer Eliot Crawshay-Williams.
A
n
Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, she gave concerts in
Bath and
Oxford
before her professional début at the Aeolian Hall in
New Bond Street in January 1917.
But to the dismay of her chapel friends, a
month later she married the flamboyant psychoanalyst Dr Ernest Jones from
Gowerton, at a time when psychoanalysis was regarded with deep suspicion.
This severely curtailed her musical output,
for Jones did not wish his wife to perform in public, and domestic duties at
their West End flat and cottage in
Sussex limited her musical
creativity.
There was also tension
between Jones’s atheism and her Christian faith.
As the First World War prevented
her taking up an award to study Russian folk music in
St Petersburg, her husband brought her to
visit Gower in August 1918.
They stayed at
Craig-y-môr, at the top of
Plunch
Lane in Mumbles, the home of Jones’s widowed
father, who had re-married.
The couple
visited
Caswell, Langland, Sketty,
Swansea Market, and Castle Street’s
Kardomah Café. But Morfydd was taken ill
with appendicitis, requiring an immediate operation. Having a car, Jones could have driven her to Swansea Hospital (now Home Gower), but instead
she was operated on at Craig-y-môr, with Jones acting as anesthetist. With hindsight ether should have been used instead
of chloroform, for tragically Morfydd died of chloroform poisoning, a few weeks
before her twenty-seventh birthday. She
was buried at the top of Oystermouth cemetery - even before any death
certificate was issued - and no post-mortem was carried out. Her grave is marked with a red sandstone
column giving the incorrect date of her birth (Jones believed she was two years
younger than she was), and the dates of her marriage and death, with words in
German from Goethe that translated read, “Here the indescribable
consequences (of love) have been fulfilled
”, for German was the language of the early psychoanalysts. The circumstances of Morfydd Owen’s death raise
several questions, which during war-time went unanswered.
So Wales lost potentially one of
her greatest musical talents, who will be remembered at the Gower Festival on 2
July, at a BBC Promenade concert, a lecture by Dr Rhian Davies at Swansea
University on 6 September, the unveiling of a blue plaque outside
Craig-y-môr the next day (the centenary of
her death), with a ceremony around her grave, and the following day a blue
plaque at her Treforest birthplace.
The obituary in “Y Gorlan”
stated: “O Death! We knew that thou were blind, but in striking Morfydd thou
hast taught us that thou art also deaf
.”
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