Riders to the Sea

I wanted to share this video and information I found about Ralph Vaughan Williams' opera Riders to the Sea. Though he actually composed the opera after the Victorian era, there is an interesting similarity between Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Irish playwright, John Millington Synge that spills over from our class discussions. Synge held a deep pride for Ireland and wished to write plays that appealed to the people of his homeland and was true to his country. As a young man, he returned home from living in Paris to write about his own country and countrymen. This struck me as very similar to Vaughan Williams as he traveled around England to collect folk songs. He wanted Great Britain to have its own musical sound and for the people to be proud of it. Many critics believe this commonality between composer and playwright is what has made Riders of the Sea so beautiful and Vaughan Williams' most successful opera.

In program notes of a recent performance in Boston of the one act opera, I found this excerpt that I would like to share. Thoughts anyone?

Hugh Ottaway, in writing about Riders to the Sea, imagines it as a metaphor for Vaughan Williams’s life:

"If struggle is called for, then so is resignation: beneath the outward cataclysm of their lives is a strange repose, a tragic faith in a merciful and benevolent God. It is easy to see how this would appeal to Vaughan Williams the Christian humanist; indeed, at bottom, it is a situation in which he, too, has found himself. If, for a moment, the composer be substituted for Synge’s islanders and the sea taken as a symbol of the overwhelming forces in the modern world, then the work will assume its true proportions as a remarkably complete expression of Vaughan William’s character and outlook."

In this video, the mother, Maurya, laments the loss of her only surviving son to the sea- following in the footsteps of her husband, father in law and five other sons. Talk about tragic.