David Byers on No coward soul is mine by Ina Boyle
This webpage is an introduction to my new edition of a work written in 1953 by the Irish composer Ina Boyle (1889-1967). Originally premièred in 1960 by Janet Baker, it has been neglected ever since, but certainly deserves to be heard again - and more than once!
STOP PRESS: To further performance opportunities (perhaps tying in with performances of Ina Boyle’s String Quartet and her setting of Edith Sitwell’s Still falls the Rain) I have prepared an arrangement of No coward soul is mine for voice and string quartet - available on request.
No coward soul is mine, for contralto [or mezzo] and string orchestra, is a setting by Ina Boyle of the popular poem by Emily Brontë (1818-1848). The poem, toned down for publication by Emily’s elder sister Charlotte, first appeared in 1846 in Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, published in London by Aylott and Jones (only two copies were sold!).
The attributed poets were of course the male pen names of the three Brontë sisters, thus avoiding the prejudice against women writers: C, E and A being Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Emily’s great novel Wuthering Heights (1847) was indeed first published under that pen name of Ellis Bell. Alas, she died from tuberculosis the following year, missing out on the novel’s eventual great success.
RH pic: The Brontë sisters, (L to R) Anne, Emily and Charlotte painted by their brother Branwell, c. 1834. Originally in the middle of the canvas, he subsequently painted himself out - though still slightly visible.
The original much-damaged painting is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Read about it here. This image has been digitally restored by Derrick Coetzee for Wikimedia Commons.
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) described this portrait as ‘not much better than sign painting as to the manipulation, but the likenesses were, I should think, admirable’.
Following Anne Brontë’s death in 1849, Charlotte prepared a new revised edition – Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey / by Ellis and Acton Bell (Smith, Elder and Co., 1850) – including selections from poems, ‘a biographical notice of the authors, a selection from their literary remains, and a preface’ by Currer Bell. This was the first time the authors’ true gender was revealed.
The poem, No coward soul is mine, embraces a pantheistic view of life, right from its outset – a confidently bold statement, reinforced by Ina Boyle’s music. The two daughters of the manse, Emily and Ina, were well attuned!
Many writers have pointed to Emily Brontë as a visionary and to her disregard of Christian orthodoxy. Jacqueline Banerjee, reviewing Nick Holland’s Emily Brontë: A life in twenty poems (Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 2018) writes, ‘Not for her the conventional idea of heaven; rather, she trusts in the “eternal years”, or, as Holland puts it, the “endless natural cycle of death and rebirth” which she experienced on the [Yorkshire] moors around her’.
Steve Whitaker, also reviewing Holland’s book (Yorkshire Times, 11 June 2018), writes: ‘The austerity of mind which shapes Emily’s poetic instinct is singular and inward-looking. Holland’s acute, and fascinatingly detailed, chapter on the poet’s attitude to religion describes a tendency to Dissent: the subordination of public sacramental observance to a God whose presence is immanent and personal. Emily’s regular foregoing of church services was borne, ironically, out of the same ardency of mind which fired her father’s commitment to Anglicanism; her relationship with God is wrought, instead, in the inner focus of poems such as ‘No Coward Soul is Mine’ whose potency disinters more general truths about life, art and the interiorisation of spirituality.’
The PDF on the right is a copy of Emily’s poem as ‘toned down’ by her sister Charlotte and set by Ina Boyle:
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No coward soul - the poem.pdf Size : 134.721 Kb Type : pdf |
Janet Gezari (in Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems, Oxford University Press, 2007) described Charlotte’s revisions of Emily’s poem as removing the poem’s calm. ‘Emily’s pronouns for the vital spirit pervading the universe are “thy”, “thou”, or “thee”. Although Charlotte makes changes to capitalisation and punctuation throughout and changes the format of the poem’s stanzas, she makes her most dramatic changes to the last two stanzas.’
These were Emily’s original closing stanzas:
Though Earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed
And suns and universes ceased to be
And thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed
LH pic: You know a poem is popular when it appears on mugs!
This one is on sale online from the Brontë Society and the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
See bronte.org.uk
Janet Gezari (op.cit.) adds that ‘Charlotte’s omission of the word “Since” from the start of the line doesn’t just make room for the emphatic repetition of “THOU”. It also cuts this line and the following one off from the rest of the poem, and replaces the thoughtfulness of a subordinate clause with the conviction of a creed. Standing independently, the lines constitute the sort of moral lesson with which Charlotte frequently closes her own poems.’
Gezari also states that Charlotte’s substitution of ‘man’ for ‘moon’ ‘makes nonsense of Emily’s thought. Life pervades human beings, who carry the whole of the known and unknown world — every existence — within them. What is once alive can’t die, although objects as objects — earth, moon, suns, and universes — may disappear.’
It’s interesting in these days of seeking out Urtext editions, that when The Guardian newspaper selected this ‘fierce, elemental lyric from a very un-Victorian Victorian’ as its Poem of the week (17 August 2009) it indeed had the original ‘moon’ and not ‘man’ in stanza 6, but retained Charlotte’s double ‘Thou’ in the final stanza — perhaps sourcing from Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, ed. Clement Shorter, collected by C.W. Hatfield (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1923).
Ina Boyle’s setting used the widely-known version by Charlotte Brontë (so ‘man’, not ‘moon’), and the full score with its piano reduction does indeed have the double ‘Thou’. However, the separate piano reduction (source C - details at the bottom of this webpage) has been emended to provide a choice between ‘Since’ or ‘Thou’ – perhaps indicating that ‘Since’ was used for the first performance in 1960 (the music itself is dated ‘April 1953’).
Ita Beausang (writing in Ina Boyle (1889-1967) – A Composer’s Life, Cork University Press, 2018) has described how Boyle circulated the score ‘to several English musicians. She sent it to Meredith Davies, organist, for consideration for the Three Choirs Festival, and to Dr Paul Steinitz, founder of the London Bach Society, but without success. The work was finally performed at a concert of Contemporary Women Composers … at the Wigmore Hall on 28 April 1960’.
Concert advertisement in The Times, 16 April 1960, page 2:
Kathleen Merritt (1901-1975) was a female role model, one of the pioneers among 20th century conductors. Her self-named orchestra was active from the 1920s to the 1970s and she also founded the Petersfield Orchestra in 1927, conducting it until 1972.
Sadly, neither her programming of women composers for this 1960 concert, nor her choice of repertoire, received many plaudits from the critic Stanley Bayliss. He awarded his gold star to Gwydion Brooke, but Janet Baker merely put in an appearance! Overall is there perhaps a suspicion here of gender bias?
This was Bayliss’s review in The Musical Times, Vol. 101, No. 1408 (June 1960), pp. 373, 374:
London Concerts
Six Women Composers
Kathleen Merritt and her orchestra (mainly masculine) presented works by half a dozen ‘Contemporary British Women Composers’ at Wigmore Hall on 28 April. ‘Contemporary’ is a much-abused word nowadays, but all six ladies, I am glad to say, are living, and five of them took ‘calls’. Not one of their works, however, could be regarded as stylistically ‘contemporary'. Curiously, the Suite for string orchestra by Antoinette Kirkwood, the youngest composer represented, sounded the most old-fashioned, and reminded me of the Parry of the ‘Lady Radnor’ and ‘English’ Suites.
The most notable works were Elizabeth Maconchy’s Concertino (in which the bassoon solo was superbly played by Gwydion Brooke) and Grace Williams’s Sea Sketches, but neither attained real individuality or memorability, both being reflective of Vaughan Williams. The close of Ruth Gipps’s seemingly long-drawn-out impression, Cringlemire Garden, struck a genuinely poetic note. Ina Boyle’s setting of Emily Brontë’s ‘No coward soul is mine’ made the mistake of converting a poem that is essentially a personal avowal into a platform harangue. Surely this particular poem does not call at all for music? The soloist was Janet Baker.
Of the two pieces for muted strings by Dorothy Howell, the Nocturne had a lulling lilt, while the Moto Perpetuo was simply a dainty salon trifle. Nothing in this programme lodged in the memory as do fragments from Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, The Boatswain’s Mate and Fête Galante. Incidentally, Dame Ethel would not have approved of this segregation of women composers!
S.B. [Stanley Bayliss]
Biographical details for Ina Boyle (Ina is an abbreviation for Selina) may be found on the website of the Ina Boyle Society Limited (inaboyle.org) and also in the preface to my edition of her String Quartet (see the feature here).
In 1974, Elizabeth Maconchy, a close friend of Ina Boyle, wrote ‘An appreciation with a Select List of her Music’ which was printed at the Dolmen Press (Maconchy, Elizabeth. Ina Boyle, TCD, Dublin, 1974):
Her music is predominantly quiet and serious, never brilliant, though it has its moments of wit or passion. In idiom it is closest perhaps to Vaughan Williams in his early middle period – but it is not just a pale reflection of his style; her music always speaks with a personal tone of voice, which at its best can express deep feelings by simple means. …
Ina’s inspiration almost always came from poetry: even her purely instrumental works were usually headed by a quotation, a few lines, perhaps, which had set off a train of thought and fired her musical imagination. Her choice of words reflected her wide reading, from translations of early Gaelic poems or medieval Latin lyrics through the poetry of John Donne to that of Edith Sitwell, for which she had a particular affinity. She was always faithful to the mood and meaning underlying the words and to their shape and rhythm, never distorting them for musical effect, but allowing them to speak more fully through her music.
That is surely also an apt description of this particular Brontë setting. It’s timeless and personal music, relying on colours, whether in the variety of string textures or in the magically side-stepping and often slow-moving harmonies: it’s the context in which she places those harmonies and enharmonic shifts, reflecting the sense of key words – little rays of light or shadows falling on ‘Heaven’s glories’ or ‘fear’ or ‘God’.
My edition of Ina Boyle’s No coward soul is mine is based on materials held in the Manuscripts and Archives Research Library of Trinity College Dublin. I acquired copies of two of the full scores along with parts (see D below) and a contralto/mezzo part with piano reduction (C) over thirty years ago. I am deeply indebted to Roy Stanley, Music Librarian, TCD, for kindly providing additional photographic access to the full score (A1) during these recent times of COVID-19.
TCD has three copies of the full score, the second of which (A2, IE TCD MS 4112, ff. 17-33) I have not been able to refer to. The other two full score copies have been closely checked against each other and the orchestral parts. The A, B, C, and D letterings are my own references. The relevant catalogue numbers in the TCD Catalogue of Manuscripts are also listed.
These are the four sources:
i. An autograph full score (A1 in the Textual Commentary) which also incorporates a piano reduction
(B1 in the Commentary), IE TCD MS 4112, ff. 1-16.
ii. Another autograph full score (A3 in the Textual Commentary) which also incorporates a piano
reduction (B3 in the Commentary), IE TCD MS 4112, ff. 34-53.
This score retains an additional bar (between 79 and 80 in my edition) which has been crossed out
and marked ‘delete’ in A1 and the parts (D), and which is not included at all in the piano reduction C,
below (iii).
iii. An autograph contralto/mezzo part with piano reduction (C in the Commentary), IE TCD MSS 4113,
ff. 1-6. This was most likely copied specifically for the London performance – the ‘deleted’ bar is totally
gone; bar 75 has ‘not’ rather than the incorrect ‘no’ elsewhere; and the choice of ‘Since’ or ‘Thou’ is
offered in bar 80.
iv. An autograph set of string parts (D in the Commentary), IE TCD MSS 4113, ff. 7-34 . Violin I, ff. 9, 10;
Violin II, ff. 15, 16; Viola, ff. 21, 22; Cello, ff. 29, 30; Bass, ff. 31, 32.
Precedence has been given to the readings in the autograph full score A1, but further informed by A3. Not surprisingly, there are small inconsistencies between the scores and the parts, not in terms of notes, but in the markings of a few accents, slurs and dynamics. A1 and the parts (D) seem likely to relate to the 1960 London performance.
There are also several moments where more dynamic markings would have been helpful (e.g. between rehearsal figures 9 and 10), but I have chosen not to add editorial suggestions, leaving it for the performers to decide.
Obvious errors or omissions have been corrected without comment, but the Textual Commentary in the full score lists other important or interesting discrepancies.
A PDF of my edition (including PDFs of orchestral parts if necessary) is available on request through this website’s Contact me link.
Once again, sincere and grateful thanks are due to Trinity College, Dublin, for making copies of the composer’s original manuscripts available for this edition.
David Byers, 9 January 2021, Belfast.
