Fury of the Sea

Lyricist. Edmond Goulding

Publisher. The Boston Music Co.

Date. 1924

Key/Range. D♭ Major (c' -- f")

COMMENTARY

Edmund Goulding’s poem, inspired by his own 1922 sailing novel Fury, is full of potent language condensed from his descriptive prose about the sea. A British singer who spent his early years in New York working as a performer in vaudeville (he once played the same bill as Nora Bayes at the Palace), Goulding turned his attention to screenwriting during the silent-picture era and is credited with working on dozens of films in the 1920s as both a writer and director. In the sound era, he became an A-list director and worked on several outstanding films over a thirty-year period with Hollywood’s leading actors. Tours met Goulding at the Algonquin Round Table, which both men frequented in the early 1920s, and the composer may have suggested that he write the lyric based on imagery from his popular book. Goulding’s passionate language inspired Tours’ most provocative setting and his most overt attempt at musical illustration. Depicting the motion of a roiling sea, the accompaniment features a relentless series of undulating arpeggios that evoke the ocean’s instability and danger, but also the romance it held for the sailor and the poet. Evocative of this instability, the harmony is mostly chromatic and is full of non-functional sonorities and progressions. Moreover, the music only cadences twice, signaling the close of each stanza with unconventional dominant sonorities at 19-20 (♭II7—I) and 33-34 (io42 —I). A radio transcription from 1945 of John Charles Thomas singing the song with an orchestral arrangement reveals the full extent of its expressive power. Tours’ most ambitious setting, “Fury of the Sea” is the clearest example of his potential to make a significant contribution to the tradition of American art song in the early twentieth century.