God’s Promise

Lyricist. Ellaline Terriss

Publisher. Chappell & Co.

Date. 1908

Key/Range. F Major (d' -- f")

COMMENTARY

Lyricist Ellaline Terriss was a beloved figure on the London stage, whose story of personal triumph and tragedy in the theatre was well-known in her day. The daughter of actor William Terriss, she rose to fame at the age of sixteen and played in numerous plays and musical comedies throughout the 1890s and 1900s. She married actor Seymour Hicks in 1895, and the two played together in The Shop Girl and The Circus Girl. The brutal murder of her father by another actor just before going on stage was the subject of a long court case that made her a sympathetic figure to the British public. Frank Tours first worked with Terriss in 1907, when he was the music director for The Gay Gordons starring the Hicks. They became close friends thereafter and were involved in several productions on the London stage, including The Dashing Little Duke (with a score by Tours) and Captain Kidd, and they were developing another show when Tours immigrated to New York in 1911. The lyric for “God’s Promise” was written as a personal expression of maternal affection for Terriss’ daughter, Betty, to whom the song was dedicated. It is divided into three sections: the first describes Terriss’ married life before her daughter was born and is addressed to Hicks; the second is also directed to her husband and describes (in the most delicate imaginable terms) the couple’s connubial bliss in conceiving their child; and the third section is addressed directly to her daughter as the flower they had prayed for—"our Lily”—a gift of divine providence. The poetic meter of the verse is consistently grouped in two groups of four trochees, and Tours’ setting varies the rhythm between one type of four-bar musical phrase that emphasizes the quarter-note beats and another that compresses the verse into two measures using many more eighth notes. He also cleverly brings variety by introducing the eighth-note rhythms at the end of the A section and then continuing them into the B section. The image of the lily, representing their child, is given a leitmotif by Tours that occurs in all three sections, highlighted by a dominant-seven-flat-nine chord on the first degree (F7—♭9), that illustrates the child as an unnamed wish (she makes no explicit mention of the lily flower), as a fetus in the womb, and as their baby after birth. With no explicit religious imagery apart from its references to God, this song has an undeniable spiritual dimension that characterizes the conception and birth of a child as a sacred mystery.