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 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 remained largely the province of students and amateurs until it entered the repertoire of Sadler's Wells in 1953.^[2]

Vaughan Williams set Synge's text essentially intact, with only a small number of changes. Although the vocal score had been in print since 1936, the full orchestral score was not published until 1973.^[3] The composer Edmund Rubbra characterised 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 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]