Riders to the Sea is a short one-act opera by Ralph Vaughan Williams, based on the eponymous play by the Irish author John Millington Synge. The composer completed the score in 1927, 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.
Vaughan Williams set Synge's text essentially intact, with only a small number of changes. Whilst the vocal sco...
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Riders to the Sea is a short one-act opera by Ralph Vaughan Williams, based on the eponymous play by the Irish author John Millington Synge. The composer completed the score in 1927, 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.
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. 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". Hugh Ottaway and Michael Kennedy have each commented on musical connections between the opera and Vaughan Williams' later Symphony No. 6. Caireann Shannon has noted that Vaughan Williams deliberately avoided use of...
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