Riders to the Sea (opera)

Riders to the Sea is a short one-act opera by Ralph Vaughan Williams, based on the play of the same name by the Irish author John Millington Synge. The composer completed the score in 1927,[1] but it was not premiered until 1 December 1937, at the Royal College of Music, London. The opera did not enter the repertoire of Sadler's Wells until 1953.[2]

Vaughan Williams set Synge's text essentially intact, with only a small number of changes. Whilst the vocal score had been in print since 1936, the full orchestral score was not published until 1973.[3] The work is generally regarded as Vaughan Williams's most successful opera, although the composer Edmund Rubbra has characterized this work as less an opera than a "spoken drama raised in emotional power and expressiveness to the nth degree".[4] Hugh Ottaway and Michael Kennedy have each commented on musical connections between the opera and Vaughan Williams's later Symphony No. 6.[3][5] Caireann Shannon has noted that Vaughan Williams deliberately avoided use of folksong in the music, and instead relied on the rhythms inherent in Synge's text for the composition.[6]

Roles

Role Voice type Premiere Cast, 1 December 1937
(Conductor: Sir Malcolm Sargent)
Bartley baritone Alan Coed
Cathleen soprano Janet Smith-Miller
Maurya contralto Olive Hall
Nora soprano Marjorie Steventon
The woman mezzo-soprano Grace Wilkinson

Synopsis

Before the opera begins: Maurya, an elderly Irishwoman, has lost her husband, father-in-law, and four of her six sons at sea.

Maurya's daughters Nora and Cathleen receive word that a body that may be their brother Michael, Maurya's fifth son, has washed up on shore in Donegal, far to the north. The sixth and last son, Bartley, is planning to go to Galway fair to sell horses. Maurya is fearful of the sea winds and pleads with Bartley to stay, but Bartley insists on going and will ride "on the red mare with the grey pony behind him". Maurya predicts that by nightfall she will have no living sons, and her daughters chide her for sending Bartley off with an ill word. Maurya goes after Bartley to bless his voyage. Nora and Cathleen receive clothing from the drowned corpse that confirms it as their brother. Maurya returns home, claiming to have seen the ghost of Michael riding behind Bartley and begins lamenting the loss of the men in her family to the sea. Nora then sees villagers carrying a load, which turns out to be the corpse of Bartley, who has fallen off his horse into the sea and drowned. Maurya laments: "They are all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me."

Recordings

References

Notes

  1. ↑ D. Hugh Ottaway, "Riders to the Sea", The Musical Times, pp. 358–360 (1952).
  2. ↑ J.O.C. (no full name given), "Opera in London: Sadler's Wells – Riders to the Sea" , The Musical Times, August 1953, Vol.94 (1326), pp. 372–373.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Ottaway, Hugh, Review of publication of full score of Riders to the Sea (1973). The Musical Times, 114 (1559): p. 45.
  4. ↑ Edmund Rubbra, "The Later Vaughan Williams". Music and Letters, pp. 1–8 (1937).
  5. ↑ Kennedy, Michael (1972–1973). "The Unknown Vaughan Williams". Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 99 (1): 31–41. doi:10.1093/jrma/99.1.31. Retrieved 2007-10-14.
  6. ↑ Shannon, Caireann (2005–2006). "The Duty of Words to Music: Ralph Vaughan Williams's Riders to the Sea" (– Scholar search). The Musicology Review (2). Retrieved 2008-05-18.

Source

External links