Rhoda Coghill

Rhoda Sinclair Coghill (14 October 1903 – 9 February 2000) was an Irish pianist, composer and poet.

Rhoda Coghill was born in Dublin and studied from the age of eight with Patricia Read at the Leinster School of Music. Between 1913 and 1925 she won 21 prizes at the Feis Ceoil (Irish music competition), among them first prizes for piano solo, piano accompaniment and piano duet, after 1923 for composition. In that year she completed her largest score, the rhapsody Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking for tenor solo, mixed chorus and orchestra, to a text by Walt Whitman. Coghill also played double bass in the orchestras of the Dublin Philharmonic Society and Radio Éireann. She continued her piano studies with Arthur Schnabel in Berlin (1927-8) to whom she had been recommended by Fritz Brase. In 1939 she took a position as the accompanist of Radio Éireann, where she remained until 1969. In this capacity she has worked with major performers of her day, both Irish and international, and gave exemplary interpretations of contemporary Irish works. She was known for remarkable sight-reading capacities and her absolute ear. She also appeared as a concerto soloist, reliably attracting large audiences.

Coghill stopped composing in the early 1940s, concentrating on her performing career, but began writing and translating poetry (three publications between 1948 and 1958). It has been suggested that a reason for this re-orientation may have been that in the poetry and literature-dominated perception of Irish culture it was easier to receive acknowledgements as a poet rather than as a composer.

Coghill remained unmarried and spent her late years from 1982 at Westfield House, Morehampton Road, Dublin, where she died aged 96. Her music manuscripts as well as some notebooks and diaries are located in Trinity College, Dublin (MS 11111).

The rhapsody Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking is one of the most forward-looking Irish compositions in the first half of the twentieth century. Written during the Civil War in Ireland in 1923, it was first performed in a small format, with a small orchestra and a vocal quartet replacing the chorus, in the 1950s; the first performance did not take place before 1990. Up to this time, Coghill had never heard an orchestra, but had a good knowledge of orchestral music from studying scores. The work is set for tenor solo, mixed chorus and orchestra, is in one continuous movement of about 23 to 25 minutes duration. The text is based on a poem of the same title by Walt Whitman. The work is remarkable for its unconventional tenor line (resembling the irregular metre of the poetry), the use of whole-tone scales, and its overall serious expression and emotional drama. One of the reasons why she didn't write more orchestral music or why she didn't promote the score for so long may also lie in her modesty as a practising Quaker.

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