Right As Rain On The Plain In Spain?
As is known, ‘the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’ is a famous line from George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion (1912), a witty and highly entertaining study of Victorian class distinctions and social conventions.
Does the rain in Spain really fall on the plane?
The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain or does it! Average rainfall in Spain as a whole is around 650 mm with the ‘wet’ part of Spain rising to around 1,000 mm and the semi-arid regions getting as little as 300 mm.
What is the rain in Spain in my Fair Lady?
| “The Rain in Spain” | |
|---|---|
| Julie Andrews as Eliza, Rex Harrison as Higgins, Robert Coote as Pickering in “The Rain in Spain” segment, 1957 | |
| Song | |
| Published | 1956 |
| Genre | Musical theatre |
| Composer(s) | Frederick Loewe |
| Lyricist(s) | Alan Jay Lerner |
” The Rain in Spain ” is a song from the musical My Fair Lady , with music by Frederick Loewe and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. The song was published in 1956 , sounding similar to piano trio in C minor 3rd movement by Josep Suk. The song is a turning point in the plotline of the musical. Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering have been drilling Eliza Doolittle incessantly with speech exercises, trying to break her Cockney accent speech pattern.
- The key lyric in the song is “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain”, which contains five words that a Cockney would pronounce with [æɪ] or [aɪ] – more like “eye” [aɪ] than the Received Pronunciation diphthong [eɪ];
With the three of them nearly exhausted, Eliza finally “gets it”, and recites the sentence with all “proper” long-As. The trio breaks into song, repeating this key phrase as well as singing other exercises correctly, such as “In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen”, in which Eliza had failed before by dropping the leading ‘H’.