David Byers on Still falls the Rain by Ina Boyle
Still falls the Rain, for contralto and string quartet, is a setting by the Irish composer Ina (Selina) Boyle (1889-1967) of the poem by Edith Sitwell (1887-1964). Subtitled ‘The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn’, the poem first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1941 and was later published in Sitwell’s The Canticle of the Rose: Selected Poems 1920-1947, Macmillan, London, 1950.
At the end of the autograph full score, Ina Boyle has written ‘Oct 8th – Nov 29th 1948’, making this work contemporaneous with her third symphony From the Darkness (1946-51).
That too set words by Edith Sitwell, its three movements using excerpts from the following poems: Invocation, beginning ‘I who was once a golden woman like those who walk in the dark …’; An Old Woman, beginning ‘I, an old woman in the light of the sun …’; and Harvest, beginning ‘I, an old woman whose heart is like the sun …’).
That too set words by Edith Sitwell, its three movements using excerpts from the following poems: Invocation, beginning ‘I who was once a golden woman like those who walk in the dark …’; An Old Woman, beginning ‘I, an old woman in the light of the sun …’; and Harvest, beginning ‘I, an old woman whose heart is like the sun …’).
RH pic: Edith Sitwell on the cover of her Rustic Elegies, 1927.
The illustration is based on a Cecil Beaton portrait.
The illustration is based on a Cecil Beaton portrait.
Still falls the Rain is a war poem, irregular in
metre and full of rich imagery in which Edith Sitwell uses the refrain
of the opening line to highlight the raining of the bombs and the
punishing rain of the crucifying nails.
The poem is an allegory of Christ’s passion and it’s
permeated with blood, the Blood of Christ, and then a final message of
hope, quoting Christ’s words, offering love and redemption. The poem
moves from night’s darkness, 1,940 years of killings (including the
crucifixion of Judas in the Potter’s Field, the Field of Blood), the
disillusionment and greed of the Second World War, to that concluding
message of possible salvation – a new dawn.
Each stanza, apart from the final seventh one, begins with the line ‘Still falls the Rain’, providing a useful signposting and sense of structure for Ina Boyle’s setting. After the long fifth stanza, the next one suggests we have brought the ‘rain’ upon ourselves and Sitwell references Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The closing stanza quotes those words of Christ offering hope for the future.
Sheila Wingfield, Lady Powerscourt, was a neighbour and friend of Ina Boyle. Her memories of Ina included the following paragraphs which refer specifically to Still falls the Rain, though the ‘five years’ and the ‘change the entire wording’ actually apply to the symphony From the Darkness (Powerscourt, Sheila, Sun Too Fast, Bles, London, 1974, pp. 210-211).
Above: Detail from the cover design for Sun Too Fast
… it was poetry that usually fired her. During five years she bent her energies to setting Edith Sitwell’s Still falls the Rain for mezzo and string quartet.
“It’s coming along slowly,” she’d say with suppressed excitement.
That particular poem moved her profoundly and she gave her whole strength and intelligence to this work; she considered it the best thing she had ever done. In her total simplicity it had never struck her as wise to approach the poet beforehand and mention her own status as a composer of music, rather than ask permission to publish the work after it was finished. One day she handed me a letter in silence.
I looked at the envelope. U.S. stamps, Californian postmark, and on the back: Dame Edith Sitwell, D.Litt., D.Litt., D.Litt.
“Read it.”
It stated in the coldest terms that Dame Edith Sitwell never gave permission for her poetry to be set to music.
“William Walton was allowed to,” Ina said in a steady voice.
Her self-control did not break although her eyes looked piteous. She was a spirited person with great independence of mind, but she had disciplined herself to a state of humility and acceptance. She could not bear the slightest showing-off. … It was this same quality which prevented her using the push required to advance her interests and help her work to be played.
Dame Edith had obviously classed her as one of those upstart youngsters of no artistic or personal merit who simply have to be snubbed. “Young people must be slapped down now and again,” she was to declare with emphasis in a television interview long afterwards.
When Edith Sitwell died I asked Ina if her setting could now be published.
“No good,” she said in a tone of defeat. “You see, I had to change the entire wording and of course the result was useless. And I simply can’t put it back again.”
In point of fact the ban still holds concerning Ina Boyle. Edith Sitwell’s literary executors remain adamant.
“It’s coming along slowly,” she’d say with suppressed excitement.
That particular poem moved her profoundly and she gave her whole strength and intelligence to this work; she considered it the best thing she had ever done. In her total simplicity it had never struck her as wise to approach the poet beforehand and mention her own status as a composer of music, rather than ask permission to publish the work after it was finished. One day she handed me a letter in silence.
I looked at the envelope. U.S. stamps, Californian postmark, and on the back: Dame Edith Sitwell, D.Litt., D.Litt., D.Litt.
“Read it.”
It stated in the coldest terms that Dame Edith Sitwell never gave permission for her poetry to be set to music.
“William Walton was allowed to,” Ina said in a steady voice.
Her self-control did not break although her eyes looked piteous. She was a spirited person with great independence of mind, but she had disciplined herself to a state of humility and acceptance. She could not bear the slightest showing-off. … It was this same quality which prevented her using the push required to advance her interests and help her work to be played.
Dame Edith had obviously classed her as one of those upstart youngsters of no artistic or personal merit who simply have to be snubbed. “Young people must be slapped down now and again,” she was to declare with emphasis in a television interview long afterwards.
When Edith Sitwell died I asked Ina if her setting could now be published.
“No good,” she said in a tone of defeat. “You see, I had to change the entire wording and of course the result was useless. And I simply can’t put it back again.”
In point of fact the ban still holds concerning Ina Boyle. Edith Sitwell’s literary executors remain adamant.
Fortunately, not so. After Edith Sitwell’s death, Lady Powerscourt protested to Sacheverell Sitwell about the ban on Ina Boyle’s settings. Eventually, in 1975 the Sitwell estate responded to the composer Elizabeth Maconchy by granting retrospective permission for Ina Boyle’s use of Edith Sitwell’s poetry.
On the basis of Edith Sitwell’s reply to Ina Boyle, dated 25 Feb 1952, quoted by Ita Beausang in her paper Ina Boyle’s Symphonic Journey: From Glencree to Amalfi (Symposium: The Symphony in Ireland, 20 April 2013) it appears that a major problem was Ina Boyle’s use of excerpts rather than complete poems in From the Darkness.
I am deeply sorry to be obliged to say to anyone as charming as you obviously are that I cannot give permission for these settings. It is only under the very rarest circumstances that I like my poems to be set, and I can never allow them to be cut, even under those circumstances. I am so sorry. It is sad and disappointing to work in vain. It is always best really to write to me first, before setting the poems.
Ina Boyle’s 1948 setting of Still falls the Rain predates Benjamin Britten’s setting of the same words in his Canticle III, Op.55, for tenor, horn and piano, written in 1954 and premièred in London’s Wigmore Hall on 28 January 1955.
Some months later, on 26 April, Edith Sitwell wrote to Britten (Edith Sitwell, Selected Letters, ed. J. Lehmann and D. Parker, Macmillan, London, 1970, p.191):
Some months later, on 26 April, Edith Sitwell wrote to Britten (Edith Sitwell, Selected Letters, ed. J. Lehmann and D. Parker, Macmillan, London, 1970, p.191):
I am so haunted and so alone with that wonderful music and its wonderful performance that I was incapable of writing before now. I had no sleep at all on the night of the performance. And I can think of nothing else. It was certainly one of the greatest experiences of my life as an artist … I can never begin to thank you for the glory you have given my poem.
Ita Beausang has kindly referred me to a letter dated 2 May 1955, from Sheila Wingfield to Ina Boyle:
It is infuriating and tragic that Edith Sitwell should
have allowed him [Britten] and not you to set her words – If only you had been
less modest and approached her with a proper fanfare and let her know
your worth, but what’s the use now.
Ina Boyle always lived at the family home at Bushey Park, Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow. In addition to her initial studies with Hewson and Kitson in Dublin, she took composition lessons by correspondence with her cousin-in-law Charles Wood. In 1921 her rhapsody for orchestra, The Magic Harp, received a Carnegie United Kingdom Trust award, for one of ‘the most valuable contributions to the art of music’ and was published at the Trust’s expense by Stainer & Bell. From 1923 and throughout the 1930s Ina Boyle travelled to London for occasional composition lessons with Vaughan Williams. See also the Ina Boyle website 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.
…
[The Symphony From the Darkness] was a setting for contralto and orchestra of poems by Edith Sitwell, and it and her setting of Still falls the Rain are among her best works.
…
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.
…
[The Symphony From the Darkness] was a setting for contralto and orchestra of poems by Edith Sitwell, and it and her setting of Still falls the Rain are among her best works.
Elizabeth Maconchy set this same poem for unaccompanied double choir in 1985, commenting that she always found the poem ‘beautiful and moving’.
Ina Boyle’s setting of Still falls the Rain is sparing in its use of the string quartet. Scrunching sevenths highlight key moments to enhance the text; simple and often subtle changes of harmony and tonality convey the sense of the text. The steady crotchet tread in the cello part of the B flat minor opening (click on RH pics) reinforces the tedium of the never-ending rain and provides a useful structural scaffolding when it returns just before the Marlowe quotation in the sixth stanza.
The opening chordal treatment and heavy crotchet tread are replaced with more flowing quavers for the fourth stanza (click on LH pics) along with a highly effective move into E minor (or actually the Aeolian mode on E), followed by a new triplet quaver motif for the ‘wounds of the baited bear’. The textural palate is significantly refreshed for ‘Christ’s blood streames’.
However, the greatest contrast comes for the final stanza (click on RH pics). Just beforehand there’s been a return to B flat minor for ‘dark-smirched with pain’ and that triplet quaver moif. At ‘Then sounds the voice of One’, there’s a Schubertian sidestep onto a chord of D flat major for Christ’s words which are sung freely over a cello iteration of D flat (hinting at that triplet quaver motif). The work ends with a chord of B flat minor constantly disturbed by the additional A natural.
Surprisingly, there are many small inconsistencies between the score and the parts, not in terms of notes, but in the markings of dynamics and accents. For example, in bar 91, the cello part has mf, while the score has p; in bar 108, the cello part has a decrescendo, while the score has a crescendo. Obvious errors or omissions have been corrected without comment in my edition, but the Textual Commentary lists some of the more important or interesting discrepancies.
My edition is based on materials held in the Manuscripts and Archives Research Library of Trinity College Dublin.
I acquired copies over thirty years ago and it’s good to see some of that material now readily available to view online (July 2015). The numbers listed here are those in the TCD Catalogue of Manuscripts.
I acquired copies over thirty years ago and it’s good to see some of that material now readily available to view online (July 2015). The numbers listed here are those in the TCD Catalogue of Manuscripts.
The edition is based on three sources:
i. the autograph score (which incorporates a piano reduction), No. 4153
(Source A in the Textual Commentary)
ii. an autograph set of parts (the Violin I part also incorporates the vocal line), No. 4154
(Sources B1 (Vn1), B2 (Vn2) B3 (Va) and B4 (Vc))
iii. an autograph piano reduction (voice and piano), No. 4155
(Source C)
(Source A in the Textual Commentary)
ii. an autograph set of parts (the Violin I part also incorporates the vocal line), No. 4154
(Sources B1 (Vn1), B2 (Vn2) B3 (Va) and B4 (Vc))
iii. an autograph piano reduction (voice and piano), No. 4155
(Source C)
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, 23 July 2015, Belfast