The Lord of the Rings (Paul Corfield Godfrey)

Originally published by MusicWeb International, 8 January 2026. Reposted here with YouTube media.

Paul Corfield Godfrey (b. 1950)
Musical Chapters from The Lord of the Rings after the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien (2005)
Complete demo recording, Volante Opera Productions, 2025
Prima Facie PFCD260-274 [15 CDs: 1034]

The People’s Ring

While the army of Gondor makes its last stand at the Black Gate, the hobbits Frodo and Sam creep into the wasteland of Mordor to throw the dark lord Sauron’s Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. History, J. R. R. Tolkien explained, hinges on “deeds of virtue of the apparently small, ungreat, forgotten in the places of the Wise and Great”.

And now Paul Corfield Godfrey, quietly living in Wales, outside the opera establishment, has composed the most monumental operatic achievement since Wagner — and potentially the most popular opera since Turandot a century ago.

Musical Chapters from the Lord of the Rings — composed over six decades, and more than 17 hours long — is the culmination of Godfrey’s operatic adaptation of Tolkien’s legendarium. Volante Opera Productions’ demo recording (released in September 2025) follows the 2023 release of Epic Scenes from The Silmarillion, while The Hobbit will be published later this year. 

Altogether, the macro-cycle lasts more than 41 hours. No British opera composer has produced anything of this scale since Joseph Holbrooke’s The Cauldron of Annwn (1908–27) and Rutland Boughton’s five Arthurian operas (1909–45).

The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) is the third and final part of Tolkien’s mythology: “the major romance and tale of the whole, which attempts to interweave and wind up all the themes and plots that have preceded” in The Silmarillion and The Hobbit: 

to combine the mythical ‘Elvish’, heroic, and fairy-tale … and unite them in one theme: the destruction of the Ring, the overthrow of Sauron (the last, visible, material, Dark Lord), the re-establishment of the Númenórean throne – and so to end the Third Age, bring the lingering ‘dominion of the Elves’ to a close, and stop on the threshold of the ‘final Dominion of Men’. (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 131)

With the permission of the Tolkien Estate, HarperCollins Publishers, and Middle-Earth Enterprises, Godfrey uses Tolkien’s dialogue (edited and minimally adapted by the composer), sets Tolkien’s poems and songs and includes a melody by Tolkien himself. He presents scenes omitted from other adaptations — Tom Bombadil, the Barrow-wight, Éowyn and Faramir’s love-story, and the Scouring of the Shire — and does not change the characters’ motivations and intentions, or invent scenes. “We have endeavoured with every fibre of our being to remain faithful to the author’s original vision,” Godfrey states. An appendix features four Lays (Lúthien, Eärendil, Durin, Nimrodel) and the last days of Aragorn and Arwen. 

Tolkien himself encouraged musical settings of his legendarium: “The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.” (Letters 131) Godfrey’s is the music drama. Likewise, Tolkien told Carey Blyton (who wished to write a Hobbit overture): “As an author I am honoured to hear that I have inspired a composer. I have long hoped to do so…” (Letters 260)

Indeed, Tolkien’s cosmogony is fundamentally musical: in the Ainulindalë (The Music of the Ainur), the first section of The Silmarillion, the world is sung into existence; the universe literally begins in music, and evil is a discord in the celestial harmony. 

Middle-Earth, in fact, demands to be sung. The index to LOTR lists some 74 poems and songs, from Hobbit walking- and drinking-songs to heroic lays, Elvish songs, Tom Bombadil’s rhymes, Barrow-wight incantations, prophecies, Rohirric calls to arms, Entish laments and battle marches, and Gondorian choruses of praise. Donald Swann set several as a song-cycle in the 1960s (The Road Goes Ever On); Stephen Oliver included some in the 1981 BBC radio adaptation; but nearly all were cut from Peter Jackson’s movies, replaced with Howard Shore’s magnificent score. For Godfrey, they are integral.

Godfrey was first introduced to Tolkien’s work in 1956, at the age of six, when his sister-in-law — the daughter of Naomi Mitchison,who wrote publicity forAllen & Unwin’s first edition of The Lord of the Rings — gave him The Hobbit. He says he “always imagined music with the books from the very first time I read them”. Tolkien’s works, according to Godfrey, offer “intense dramatic situations” and “‘impressionist’ passages describing landscape and character, all of which seem to me to cry out for musical depiction”. 

Godfrey’s first major orchestral work was a suite inspired by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (1966/67), followed by a three-act setting of The Black Gate is Closed (revised for this cycle). In the early 1970s, he envisaged what he calls a “totally impractical” 13-night cycle encompassing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. (Some of the acts and scenes written for it appear here.) Encouraged by Tolkien’s children Christopher and Priscilla, he composed his Silmarillion cycle (1981–96, plus The War of Wrath, 2017). 

Following the success of Volante’s recordings, the Tolkien Estate permitted Godfrey to use the text of LOTR and for the music to be performed and recorded. Producer Simon Crosby Buttle (who sings the role of Frodo, and to whom the composer dedicated the score) abridged Godfrey’s earlier text, and the composer completed the score during the COVID pandemic. 

Demo recording

Volante Opera Productions’ demo recording is a proof of concept rather than the ideal recording; its purpose, the company states, “is simply to get the piece heard”. (Recording, vocal and orchestral scores are available from Volante Opera Productions. Audio files can be bought from Presto Classical.) Recorded over nearly five years, it features a cast of 34 professional singers from Welsh National Opera, undertaking 79 solo roles and chorus parts, recorded individually and then pieced together. 

Although the cycle has nearly 80 named characters, many are dramatically marginal and do not sing much. Even Sam, for instance, is sometimes present on stage but silent for entire scenes; Legolas and Gimli are often visually present but musically minor; Elrond and Galadriel appear in two or three acts, and Tom Bombadil only in one; and Arwen sings only in the final part. Many roles are doubled — a practical solution that would also be standard in staged performances.

The vocal distribution is classic: tenors as introspective idealists (Frodo, Faramir), young men (Pippin), elves (Elrond, Legolas), and character parts (Bilbo, Gollum, Wormtongue); baritones as ethical leaders (Gandalf, Aragorn), sturdy supports (Sam), robust adults (Merry); basses as rulers (Théoden, Denethor), elemental figures (Treebeard, the Voice of Sauron), warriors (Boromir), and dwarves (Gimli); sopranos as radiant magical beings (Goldberry, Galadriel); mezzos as mortal women (Éowyn); and contraltos as matrons (Ioreth). Gollum is a character tenor part whose “stratospheric speeches” and “extremes of high and low registers may well prove nearly impossible for some voices to encompass”, the composer concedes; he suggests that the singer make minor adjustments to suit his voice, or adjust Sprechstimme-style muttering.

Philip Lloyd-Evans (Gandalf), Stephen Wells (Aragorn), Simon Crosby Buttle (Frodo), James Schouten (in the double role of Elrond and Faramir), and Angharad Morgan (Galadriel) are the outstanding singers. Julian Boyce (Sam) sings well, is sturdy, reliable, and delivers the comic songs with aplomb, but is perhaps too mature for the part of an inexperienced young gardener discovering his courage. Saruman is written for a Handelian tenor, whose neo-Stravinskian baroque is “the cultivated double-speak of the Orwellian demagogue”. Cast somewhat against type, Gareth Lloyd (Saruman) sounds slightly tight and strained in the coloratura — appropriate for a character whose honeyed voice is a calculated tool of persuasion and control.

The orchestral writing is much better than the recording suggests. Largely self-taught as a composer, his musical language formed before later study, Godfrey characterises his style as late Romantic, and identifies his immediate influences as Holst and Vaughan Williams — but his “period of radical experimentation” means he can deploy avant-garde techniques when they suit the drama. The core orchestra is the kind of grand, flexible ensemble that opera houses already deploy for Berlioz, Wagner, and Strauss, and could be accommodated in most opera houses. Instruments establish the colour of sound worlds: recorders and a tenor saxophone are used only in the Tom Bombadil act, suiting his archaic, pastoral nature, for instance, while chimes and deep bells are added for the neo-Byzantine setting of Gondor. 

The demo recording, however, uses a virtual orchestra based on recorded instrumental sounds: audio samples of instruments are sequenced in recording software and played. It does not have the bloom and colour a real orchestra would give, but the ear adjusts. However, some scenes (such as the Shire at the start) sound drier than they would in performance. Sound effects add drama: swords clash, spears shake, shields splinter, horses gallop and whinny, oliphaunts trumpet. 

But it is very clear: even in less-than-ideal form, this is a masterpiece. After listening to the cycle several times over the last few months, dipping into scenes, its music echoing in my head, I feel like someone in the 19^th century who has seen the score of Berlioz’s Les Troyens. This is the great unperformed work of our time, and it deserves to be staged.

Dramatic structure / Theatrical highlights

Godfrey composed The Lord of the Rings cycle as six operas: each of the three volumes of LOTR is split into two, totalling 30 acts (average length half an hour). (Synopsis and libretto online.)

The Fellowship of the Ring (5hrs 30)

Part I. The Ring Sets Out (2hrs 51)
A Long-Expected Party (34 minutes)
The Return of the Shadow (45 minutes)
Tom Bombadil (38 minutes)
The Prancing Pony (24 minutes)
Flight to the Ford (34 minutes)

The hobbit Frodo has come into possession of the Ring of Power that belonged to the dark lord Sauron, who seeks to use it to conquer Middle-Earth. Pursued by the Black Riders, undead agents of Sauron, and assisted by the mysterious ranger ‘Strider’ (Aragorn), Frodo and his companions make for the Elven haven of Rivendell. Frodo is wounded by the Black Riders with a cursed blade, but the river rises in flood at the Ford of Bruinen, and they are swept away “by a loud rolling of many stones, and a plumed cavalry of waves” (a splendid coup de théâtre).

The opera begins in the cosy familiarity of the Shire: cheerful, bourgeois, domestic, rather provincial and insular, a world of pub gossip, birthday parties, and prosy old Bilbo telling stories everyone has heard before. Bilbo’s vanishing at his birthday party is a clever stage illusion; shadows thicken in Gandalf’s recital; but audiences will be won over towards the end of the second act: the encounter with the Black Rider in the woods.

The scene begins in suspense, rises to tension and terror, and ends in beauty. In the bosky dusk, Frodo and the hobbits hear hoofbeats coming along the path, and hide. A cloaked and hooded figure rides in on a black horse, and halts, searching; Frodo’s hand creeps towards the ring. The Black Rider moves on. Sam and Pippin obliviously sing a drinking song — cut off by a horrifying screech. Another Black Rider follows; it dismounts, and nears the hobbits’ hiding place with horrible intent, like one of M. R. James’s malign apparitions. Then through the trees appears a procession of Elves, “shining as if lit by a light from within”. Their chorus, ‘Gilthoniel! O Elbereth!’, unfolding in luminous, slowly shifting homophony, seems to suspend time; it is the first manifestation onstage of the older, richer, stranger world outside the Shire. The Black Rider flees; the hobbits have been saved.

This is the only adaptation of LOTR in which the primordial nature spirit Tom Bombadil appears. His songs have the springtime vigour and directness of folksong. They are genuine earworms; I have had them stuck in my head for weeks. Goldberry’s coloratura vocalises are the opera’s first solo female passages, while Frodo’s lyrical address to her (‘O slender as a willow wand!’) falls like balm on the ear. 

The Weathertop scene is masterly. The stage is in darkness, the one circle of light a campfire. Aragorn tries to distract the hobbits by telling them the story of Gilgalad, but the shadows press in. The Ringwraiths appear out of the gloom; three of the hobbits fall to the ground; and only Frodo and Strider try to fend them off. The moment that Frodo puts the ring on his finger, the Riders are revealed for the first time in their true forms as “great grey and haggard shapes of men, with helmets on their heads and swords of steel in their hands”, led by a fallen king. Godfrey thinks pictorially: darkness, light, and illumination revealing further terror.

There are two delightful comic songs, both of which can be found on YouTube. “The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late”, sung by Frodo in the inn at Bree, already has one fan: one YouTube listener remarks that it “has become a favourite for my daughter … she asks to watch it every day”. (That’s called audience data!) 

Sam’s “The Song of the Troll”, with its heavy, stomping energy, should also make a great effect.

Part 2. The Ring Goes South (2hrs 39)
The Council of Elrond (52 minutes)
Farewell to Rivendell (22 minutes)
A Journey in the Dark (23 minutes)
The Mirror of Galadriel (49 minutes)
The Breaking of the Fellowship (23 minutes)

In Rivendell, the Council of Elrond the Wise resolves to destroy the Ring by taking it to Mordor and throwing it into the fires of Mount Doom where it was forged. But their mission soon goes awry: the wizard Gandalf falls to his apparent death in a fight with a demonic balrog in the mines of Moria, while another member of the company, the warrior Boromir, son of the steward of Gondor, tries to take the ring from Frodo. The hobbit and his loyal gardener Sam set out to Mordor by themselves.

The Council of Elrond is a tour de force. The lengthy debate scene is often considered one of the more boring parts of Tolkien’s novel; the author himself (Letters 144) acknowledged: “Many readers have rather stuck at the Council of Elrond.” Godfrey varies the textures and timbres — tenors (Elrond, Glorfindel), basses (Glóin, Boromir), and baritones (Gandalf) — and the vocal line is consistently melodic. Embedded vignettes (Mordor’s messenger to the dwarf Dáin, Gandalf’s imprisonment by Saruman in Isengard) act as bursts of narrative action within the static frame.

The Mines of Moria (A Journey in the Dark) will probably terrify the audience: it is claustrophobic and oppressive. Moria is an ordeal, not the exciting video-game level (“They have a cave troll!”) of the movie. The scene is 17 minutes long, but will feel like an age, because the audience will lose almost complete sense of time and place. Much of it takes place in nearly total darkness, “hollow and immense” — a black void, with the Fellowship huddled around the light from Gandalf’s staff; and the orchestra produces a low-frequency oppressive sound: double bassoon, double-basses, double-bass clarinet, horns, tubas — and drums in the deep. Those drums jolted me out of my seat, even on a summer afternoon; they would certainly hit a theatre audience primed for terror. Then the balrog comes, a towering figure of smoke and shadow: with gigantic, Xenakis-like tectonic percussion and grinding, repeated figures that surge up from the depths of the pit, it will make a hell of an impression. 

After this, the audience absolutely needs an interval and to escape to Lothlórien, the Elves’ Golden Wood. The Mirror of Galadriel is perhaps the most beautiful act in the cycle: pre-Raphaelite twilight lyricism, a loveliness already fading. The act celebrates the soprano voice: Galadriel moves from calm authority to radiant temptation, renunciation, and farewell — the melody ‘Namárië’, written by Tolkien himself. 

The Two Towers (4hrs 27)

Part 3. The Treason of Isengard (2hrs 37)
The Plains and the Forest (33 minutes)
The Riders of Rohan (32 minutes)
The King of the Golden Hall (31 minutes)
The Journey to Isengard (34 minutes)
The Voice of Saruman (28 minutes)

The Two Towers moves from the fantasy world of Fellowship into the political, martial world of men and war. It concerns the machinations of the wizard Saruman, who seeks the Ring and power over Middle-Earth, opposed by Gandalf, returned from the dead. 

Near the start of The Two Towers comes one of the cycle’s finest numbers, the Lament for Boromir, a trio for baritone, bass, and tenor, with the slain warrior’s horn sounding in counterpoint. Comments on YouTube have been enthusiastic: 

• “I’m actually about to ascend this is exactly how I imagined their voices, this is BEAUTIFUL.” 
• “This song is beautifully done. I really hope the opera gets made, it sounds amazing.” 
• “This is magnificent! I can’t wait to hear more!”

Treebeard’s strange, solemn song ‘In the willow-meads of Tasarinan’, a “murmuring chant” recited from offstage over a quiet orchestra, ends the act; the audience is left with the shadow of the trees. It is the voice of the forest remembering itself.

Gandalf heals Théoden, The King of the Golden Hall of Rohan, from his despair in a scene of ever-increasing excitement. Gandalf brings the king into the light, all the men shout ‘Forth Eorlingas!’, clash spear on shield, and ride out. Only the shield-maiden Éowyn, the king’s niece, remains, looking after them sadly.

The long night of the siege at the Hornburg alternates action scenes and interior scenes: orcs swarm and snarl, charging the gate and calling for the king; arrows fly; trumpets blare; infernal devices blow walls to rubble; the king rides out; the sun rises; Gandalf appears in a blaze of glory; and a forest of trees devours the invaders. Audiences would buy tickets for this scene alone.

The Ents, giant tree shepherds, destroy Saruman’s citadel of Isengard. The final act rises in a crescendo from tension through fear and dread to exhilaration: in a parley with Saruman, Gandalf breaks Saruman’s staff, ending the treacherous wizard’s power. The young hobbit Pippin looks into the Palantir (a magical seeing-stone), and is interrogated by Sauron; a Ring-Wraith passes overhead, blotting out the moon and Gandalf rides with the young hobbit to Minas Tirith, capital of Gondor, “before the waves of war surround it”.

Part 4. The Ring Goes East (1hr 50)
The Black Gate is Closed (37 minutes)
The Window on the West (38 minutes)
Cirith Ungol (35 minutes)

Meanwhile, Frodo and Sam press on doggedly towards Mordor, binding Gollum, the former owner of the Ring, to their service. 

The Black Gate is Closed feels almost Beckettian: three characters — two of them in existential crisis — wander through a wasteland, trudging wearily and hopelessly, and get nowhere. (No mention of taters, turnips, or other root vegetables, though.) The spare, stark orchestration, bleak and hollow, suits a landscape of mists, of fire-blasted and poisoned earth. This deliberately grey and weary act ends with a tremendous burst of power: the oliphaunt chorus, sung by the Haradrim passing through the Black Gate, an awe-inspiring moment. Even on MIDI, it is enormous: tremendous in weight and scale. In an opera house, its massed sonority, trumpets placed offstage left and right, would likely hit with something of the shock Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts had for his contemporaries. Godfrey thinks spatially.

The Window on the West is an oasis in the hobbits’ travels and travails: Faramir, fair-minded and noble, is the last sympathetic person Frodo and Sam encounter on their quest. He has both a lyrical, almost dreamlike narrative describing his brother Boromir’s body floating down the river, and a startlingly lovely phrase (accompanied by celesta) describing the waterfall by moonlight.

Cirith Ungol takes the two hobbits into the threshold of Mordor. The nine Ringwraiths ride out of the ghostly city of Minas Morgul at the head of an army of monsters amidst lightning and frenzied trumpets — it would make a powerful impression. The opera ends in the lair of the giant spider Shelob, glimpsed (eyes shining in the dark) and heard (a bubbling, hissing gas blower) before her monstrous body is seen. Frodo, paralysed by her bite, is taken by orcs into Mordor to be interrogated; Sam hurls himself against the gates and falls senseless to the ground. The act ends in literal and emotional blackness. 

The Return of the King (5hrs 46)

Part 5. The War of the Ring (2hrs 35)
Minas Tirith (21 minutes)
The Passing of the Grey Company (32 minutes)
The Siege of Gondor (26 minutes)
Pelennor Fields (28 minutes)
The Houses of Healing (35 minutes)
The Black Gate Opens (13 minutes)

Part 6. The End of the Third Age (3hrs 11)
Mount Doom (45 minutes)
The Field of Cormallen (26 minutes)
The Steward and the King (30 minutes)
Homeward Bound (31 minutes)
The Scouring of the Shire (24 minutes)
The Grey Havens (35 minutes)

The Return of the King rises to mythic heights scaled by few since the 19^th century. Its first half is grim, sombre, and desperate. “The Darkness has begun; there will be no dawn,” Gandalf foretells at the end of the first act. The city of Minas Tirith is besieged; kings and rulers die in battle or by fire; heroes are wounded; and the free West rallies to make a final doomed stand outside the very gates of Mordor itself. All seems lost; but then comes the eucatastrophe, “the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’”. The Ring is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom, the dark lord Sauron and his forces fall, and the rightful king returns.

The Siege of Gondor is almost Greek tragedy, focused on the despair of Denethor, steward of Gondor, father of Boromir and Faramir. A messenger brings news that the city is burning, and the mad Steward orders his and the wounded Faramir’s funeral pyre to be built. Gandalf’s confrontation with the Witch-King is intimate yet epic: it calls for two actors, one practical effect (a falling gate), one lighting cue/prop (a flaming sword), and an offstage horn. 

Pelennor Fields is superb: strong scenes escalate until it ends in heroic affirmation. The battle scenes in Jackson’s cinematic Lord of the Rings are spectacular, but Godfrey keeps the battle sequences offstage for the most part; theatre cannot put thousands of soldiers and gigantic elephants onstage without that stage collapsing. Godfrey’s is a Shakespearean battlefield: an almost abstract space, midst swirling smoke and flames; not clashes of armies, but individual combat. Musically, it is a war scene as Berlioz would have drawn it, with horns and trumpets onstage, framed by the magnificent chorus of the Men of Rohan, ‘We heard the horns in the hills ringing’. Éowyn slays the Witch-King to protect her uncle, fulfilling a prophecy that no man can slay the necromancer, but Théoden dies of his wounds, and Éowyn too collapses, grievously injured. Denethor commits suicide, and thick stupefying smoke fills the stage. The arrival of the Corsairs’ ship with its dark sails seems “the last stroke of doom” for the city, but the Rohirrim leader Éomer’s defiance in the face of death (‘Out of doubt, out of dark, to the day’s rising…’) turns to astonishment when Aragorn and company alight — a hugely cathartic moment. It is eucatastrophe on a small scale (‘Yet twice blessed is hope unlooked for’).

Mordor is an Expressionist landscape populated by Sprechgesang orcs, punctuated by bursts of brass and obsessive ostinatos, over which the star of Eärendil is the sole, distant hope. The destruction of Mordor is seen from three different perspectives: the army at the Black Gate (history viewed from the outside: heroism, despair); the two hobbits in Mordor (history viewed from inside the catastrophe: determination, metaphysical cataclysm); and Faramir and Éowyn, two ordinary mortals waiting for death — a dramatization of what Godfrey terms Tolkien’s “literary interlacing”. In The Black Gate Opens, the creatures of Mordor pour forth out of the Morannon; Pippin collapses, felled by a rock, at the moment the cry ‘The Eagles are coming!’ goes up. Mount Doom ends with an apocalyptic scene of Romantic scale: 

Through the inner curtain can be seen the shape of the Mountain… It seems to explode with flame, and in the flame it appears that a great golden Ring catches fire and is consumed. Through the Ring there appears an Eye; and as the Ring withers, so the Eye crumbles and fades into blackness. The Nazgul appear, riding high above the Mountain, until caught in the fiery ruin of hill and sky they crackle, wither and fall to their doom. The Mountain reels beneath a great earthquake, and fires cover its sides. The light slowly fades, only the flickering flames being visible as vast plumes of smoke belch from the riven ground.

The action ‘rewinds’ to the Black Gate (the first time the technique has been used since Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, Godfrey believes), and continues from the identical musical point where Pippin was knocked unconscious:

Gandalf and Aragorn are beneath the banner of the King, around which the hosts of Mordor rage. Three great golden Eagles fly forward onto the scene, sweeping down towards the forces of Mordor. And in that instant there comes a sudden thunder as of drums very distant. The hosts of Mordor suddenly halt and quail; Gandalf raises his voice above the increasing tumult, as the Ringwraiths wheel and fly like the wind back towards Mordor. The thunder grows suddenly louder, and a great fire leaps up beyond the Black Gate. The Gate itself quivers with shock, and collapses as the earthquake reaches it; the hosts of Mordor scream and flee. Above the ruined Gate there reaches a great darkness, a shape of shadow like a vast threatening hand. Enormous it rears above the scene, terrible but impotent: for even as it leans over the stage, a great wind takes it, and it is all blown away, and passes.

In Gondor, Faramir and Éowyn brace themselves for death, behold the collapse of the mountain, and find life. Éowyn’s ‘I stand in Minas Arnor…’ is glorious, and the orchestration effulgent — a soaring outburst of joy.

They turn towards one another, and embrace high above the world. The light behind the inner curtain rises as the mountains of shadow disappear, and silhouette the two figures with sunlight. Slowly the light fades, and the inner curtain becomes again opaque. But the light continues to shine with a steady golden glow upon the scene.

The Steward and the King is ceremonial and liturgical, dignified and beautiful, with grandiose orchestration and pealing bells. An Eagle, poised in mid-air, lit by the setting sun, announces the fall of Mordor; the coronation of Aragorn is magnificent pageantry; the White Tree is planted and flowers, symbolising the return of hope to Gondor; and an elven procession arrives for the king’s wedding to Arwen. It is sublime.

The rest of the opera is a long, slow winding-down to an elegiac close, a parting of ways; Godfrey himself calls the last acts “an extended valedictory postlude to the whole”. Much that was beautiful fades and passes, is lost. Even the hobbits’ beloved Shire is afflicted, turned into an industrial dictatorship, Mordor on a smaller scale; The Scouring of the Shire closes in horror and mourning for the dead ‘Sharkey’. Frodo the Ringbearer himself is “broken by a burden of fear and horror — broken down, and in the end made into something quite different” (Letters, p. 279). His aria, ‘The Sea Bell’ (Frodo’s Dreme), is a melancholy, affecting piece, somewhat in the line of Britten. There is no place for him in this life. “I tried to save the world, and it has been saved, but not for me,” he explains. He takes ship with the last Elves leaving Middle-Earth, and sails into the West. The chorus of elves that closes the cycle is as transcendental as the finales of Parsifal or Mahler II.

Musical sub-creation

The Lord of the Rings, in Tolkien’s view, was “only the end part of a work nearly twice as long” (Letters 163) — “interdependent and indivisible” from The Silmarillion (Humphrey Carpenter, Letters 131). Godfrey, too, regards his adaptations of the legendarium as an integral whole. His edifice is built on the largest leitmotif system since Wagner: nearly 500 motifs — 210 in The Silmarillion, the geological bedrock of the score, “taken for granted as a background to the dramatic development, and only slowly reveal[ing] new musical facets as the action develops”; 77 in The Hobbit; and 204 in LOTR. (See Godfrey’s thematic analysis.)

Although the scale is Wagnerian, leitmotifs are “a practical matter of meaningfully organising the music over such a long time span rather than an imitation of Wagnerian practice”, Godfrey explains. Although both are multi-opera fantasy cycles built on leitmotifs, the composer maintains (like Tolkien) that the only resemblance is that both rings were round.

Wagner’s motifs are short symphonic themes symphonically developed; Godfrey’s are extended melodic phrases that are stated and varied, recurring in different harmonic, textual, or modal guises to mark conceptual continuity, “underlining dramatic and emotional parallels”. “The recurrence of the same dramatic themes throughout all of Middle-Earth means that there is a continual chance to refine, redefine and remould the musical material which results in the whole of my Tolkien-based work becoming a massive symphonic structure of its own.”

Middle-Earth is a place of deep musical time: motifs and songs pass down generations; characters and places inherit themes; and ancient melodies echo in the Third Age. Thus, a theme originating in The Children of Húrin reappears in LOTR as the Númenórean realm in exile (Gondor), split into triumphant and pessimistic variants, symbolising the destiny of Men across millennia; Elvish material is largely inherited from The Silmarillion, linking Rivendell and Lothlórien to lost Elven kingdoms; the Eärendil theme returns as primordial hope resurfacing at the darkest moment; Beren’s heroic theme becomes aggressive and militarised when taken up by Boromir and Denethor; and Shelob’s music reflects Ungoliant’s as monstrous inheritance. Most strikingly, the last pages of the final act, The Grey Havens, feature music not from LOTR, but from The Silmarillion; the 41-hour macro-cycle begins and ends with the theme of Ilúvatar, the One. Godfrey’s operatic adaptation of Tolkien is, in fact, Ring-shaped.

Tolkien differentiated Middle-Earth’s creatures and races through language; Godfrey does so through music. “The invention of language is the foundation,” the philologist-turned-fabulist revealed: “The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse” (Letters 165). The Elven tongue Sindarin, rich in liquids and open vowels, flows with a natural lyricism, while the Black Speech of Mordor, percussive and brutal, hissing with fricatives and studded with plosives, makes “a shadow seem to pass over the high sun”. 

Indeed, languages were almost a substitute for music for Tolkien. He had “a sensibility to linguistic patterns which affects me emotionally like colour or music” (Letters 163), but, as he told the composer Carey Blyton, although his family was musical, “owing to defects of education and opportunity as an orphan, such music as was in me was submerged … or transformed into linguistic terms. Music gives me great pleasure and sometimes inspiration, but I remain in the position in reverse of one who likes to read or hear poetry but knows little of its technique or tradition, or of linguistic structure” (Letters 260). The Lord of the Rings was “an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real” (Letters 205).

Godfrey gives each culture a distinct musical idiom (modes, rhythms, melodic profiles) — a technique, he notes, derived from Celtic folk music: “the improvised singing of Welsh choristers in informal settings (when freed from the shackles of nineteenth century Germanic hymnody)”. The Elves have long-breathed modal melodies of luminous stillness, largely inherited from The Silmarillion, embodying their ancientness and fading splendour; the Númenórean realms of Men have layered themes of mortality, inheritance, and decline, and Gondor later acquires a deliberately archaic ceremonial style recalling mediaeval open-fifth harmony; Rohan is ‘marked’ by plunging intervals, galloping asymmetrical rhythms, and conflicted metres that mirror horse-culture and irregular warfare; the Ents have primordial, drifting harmonies and rootlike rambling rhythmic lines; and the forces of Mordor are characterised by chromatic instability, distorted thirds, and harmonic processes that corrupt whatever musical material they engulf. Each culture thus speaks its own musical ‘language’, but through a grammatical system of sound. 

This is not, however, an arid architecture of leitmotifs and harmonies; Godfrey’s score abounds in tunes and phrases that lodge in the ear.  

For the most part, the score is through-composed, the narrative unfolding in consistently melodic or expressive recitative with mini-arias embedded. Godfrey believes that music drama must be able to “react to sudden changes of mood and interactions between characters”, and considers Tolkien’s “slightly elevated” style “ideally fitted to musical setting”: “Often the rhythmic element in the prose … leads immediately to a musical phrase which fits the words like a glove.” The dialogue “proceeds at full length, with the musical undercurrent providing incident and cross-references along the way”. Even comprimario parts such as the elves of Lothlórien have beautiful lines to sing.

Unsurprisingly, too, the choral writing is excellent and varied. Wargs (demonic wolves in the service of the Dark Lord) are not growling basses and baritones, as one might expect, but an eldritch soprano/alto chorus. The Entmoot intones like a Russian Orthodox or Gregorian choir, then explodes in a ferocious, primordial burst of fury as the tree shepherds march on Isengard. 

As a former singer himself, Godfrey understands the voice, and his approach is deeply singer-centred. He sang Monteverdi and Palestrina, Britten and Finzi in school and church choirs; was a member of the Pendyrus Male Choir when it premiered new works by William Mathias, Alun Hoddinott, and David Wynne; and has listened to opera singers for more than half a century.

Godfrey is prepared to adapt passages to singers, and says he is “always guided by their opinions as to what works best for their voices”: “I would always prefer performers to feel comfortable with the music they are required to deliver, and allow themselves accordingly freedom to bring their own interpretation and expression to a particular concept.” Thus, he revised the scores of The Hobbit and LOTR “simply as the result of practical observation over many years of what does and does not work in live performance”, and wrote with specific singers in mind:

“The two sonorous bass roles of Gandalf and Aragorn were deliberately adjusted to reflect the qualities of the voices of Philip Lloyd-Evans and Stephen Wells, with the higher baritone of the former contrasted with the heroic bass-baritone of the latter. This in turn led to different considerations for the treatment of the lower bass voices such as Denethor and Théoden, and conditioned not only the actual style of singing and writing but also the actual nature of the composition itself.” 

The result is a modern opera that singers would want to sing and audiences want to hear.

Grand opera revived

In transforming Tolkien’s beloved heroic romance into an opera, Godfrey has achieved the seemingly impossible. A composer who writes operas with several hundred leitmotifs developed over decades should not, one would think, also write a colossal crowd-pleaser — and yet his cycle is at once musically complex, artistically serious, and theatrical entertainment in the grand manner.

LOTR has a rare and real sense of showmanship and dramatic construction, and a dazzling array and mastery of moods: comedy and charm; suspense and excitement; beauty, courage, and idealism; horror, fear, and dread; myth, heroism, and the epic; grief and melancholy; ecstasy, exultation, and the sublime.

Godfrey is almost prodigal in his imagination. Almost every act has a tentpole scene — something that would astonish, delight, and overwhelm audiences. There are disappearances and transformations; magic and sorcery; floods, fire, erupting volcanoes; walking trees, eagles, giant spiders, armies of orcs, Ringwraiths and balrogs; processions, battles, and coronation scenes. 

Godfrey, in fact, has revived grand opera for the 21^st century — not by imitation, but by dramatic necessity. He stands in the lineage of Berlioz and Meyerbeer (once the most acclaimed and popular composer in the world). 

In the 19^th century, opera (as I have written elsewhere) was the blockbuster before cinema; fantasy and epic before Tolkien and Game of Thrones. 

Opera — particularly French grand opéra — was a maximalist, popular, theatrical art form combining mythic storytelling, spectacle, and melody. Its stakes were life and death, its scope panoramic. It concerned ordinary people caught up in historical events: political catastrophe, mobs, massacres, war, conspiracy, revolution, fights against oppression, tyrants overthrown, cities burning, the founding of nations and the fall of empires. 

It depicted supernatural and cosmic horror, the apocalyptic and the cataclysmic: devils, sorcerers, enchantresses, zombie nuns, fairies, monsters, prophecies, the end of the world, Judgement Day. It thrilled crowds with stage effects and spectacle: exploding castles; erupting volcanoes; coronations; shipwrecks, sea battles, and burning fleets; cavalry charges; ice-skating religious fanatics; avalanches, floods, and fire; aerial battles between angels and demons; horseback processions glittering with armour; funeral cortèges with thousands of crowd members. Through popular entertainment, it confronted religious fanaticism, political extremism, bigotry, xenophobia, and colonialism. It was banned and censored; it caused riots and revolutions, and even led to the creation of Belgium. 

It is, then, the ideal format for an opera of the scale of LOTR — and Godfrey knows this repertoire. His panoramic suite of reviews for MusicWeb International (this website) of operas from the Baroque to the present day includes works by Berlioz and Meyerbeer, as well as by Spontini, Gounod, Bizet, Delibes, Massenet, Godard, Franck, and Lalo, and large-scale Russian, German, British and Danish operas.

One need look no further than the fact that the two halves of Fellowship and The Two Towers are in five acts — the classic structure of French grand opéra such as Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, the most successful work of its age, or L’Africaine (Vasco de Gama). Each act does something different; its flavour and tone contrast with surrounding acts; and the opera becomes a journey — where we start is far from where we end. 

Thus, in Fellowship, the first two acts establish the world and its stakes (the Shire, Rivendell, the Ring); Act II is rising tension (the Black Riders appear, the Fellowship sets out); Act III is a hinge point — crisis / transformation / big set piece (Tom Bombadil, not present in any other adaptation, the first step out of the Shire; Moria and the fall of Gandalf); Act IV is a slight release of tension (the Prancing Pony, Lothlórien); Act V ends with a climax or cliffhanger, so the audience goes out thrilled, excited, and wanting to see the next instalment. 

Godfrey remembers what opera used to do — and does it again, brilliantly. And in so doing, LOTR could pave the way for the restoration of Romantic opera: Meyerbeer and Halévy (considered the leader of the French school), the stupendous maximalism of Pacini, and Eastern European operas seldom staged in the West.

Popularity of The Lord of the Rings

There is an enormous global audience for Tolkien — and Godfrey’s cycle could sell tickets in thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands. LOTR is known throughout the world, with a readership aged from eight to 88 (or even eleventy-one). The most popular novel of the twentieth century, it has sold more than 150 million copies; been translated into 57 languages (as of 2019); and was voted Britain, Australia, and Germany’s favourite book, as well as Amazon’s book of the millennium.

Peter Jackson’s trilogy is rightly considered one of cinema’s greatest achievements of all time: it won 17 Oscars and grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide at the box office. It is still screened in sell-out cinema marathons; individual scenes on YouTube have been viewed more than 79 million times; and concert performances of Howard Shore’s score tour the world, filling venues like London’s Royal Albert Hall and O2 Arena, Munich’s Olympiahalle, and Berlin’s Uber Arena. 

Tolkien is adapted for television (The Rings of Power was Amazon Prime’s most-watched series worldwide, seen by more than 150 million viewers), while Middle-Earth will return to cinema screens next year (Andy Serkis’s The Hunt for Gollum, 2027). 

Online Tolkien fandom is colossal: r/tolkienfans has more than 400,000 subscribers and r/lotr 1.2 million followers; and TikTok #lordoftherings content has received hundreds of millions to billions of views across the hashtag. 

LOTR could, in fact, bring entirely new audiences to opera: as an adaptation of a story that is known and loved, The Lord of the Rings is easier to sell to the general public than Mozart, Traviata or Bohème.

Already, YouTubers have responded enthusiastically to Godfrey’s cycle:

• I am not a big fan of opera yet, but I might give it a try for the sake of Tolkien’s great Tales and the love, labour, faithfulness to the books and the professionality this is produced with.
• Finally, we will have ability to listen to the songs of Middle-Earth. 
• Woah. I’m looking forward to listening to this! 
• I was already excited and then! I heard! Frodo’s dream of the sea-shell?!?! THIS IS GOING TO BE MY ENTIRE PERSONALITY WHEN IT DROPS I CAN FEEL IT 
• I’m so excited for the release!! 
• How majestic and epic the music sounds! 
• Such a labor of love 🥰🥰🥰 

Programming

To introduce the work to the public, companies could semi-stage scenes (The Mirror of Galadriel, The King of the Golden Hall, The Steward and the King, for instance), or revive the 19^th-century highlight concerts that popularised Wagner’s music. Those concerts might feature Frodo’s Man in the Moon song, the Troll song, Lindir’s brief but exquisite Song of the Blessed Realm, Galadriel’s ‘I sang of leaves’ or ‘Namárië’, the Lament for Boromir, Aragorn’s ‘Where now is the horse and the rider?’, the oliphaunt chorus, the Pelennor Fields chorus, the coronation of Aragorn, ‘The Sea-Bell’, and the final elven chorus at the Grey Havens.

Where could LOTR be staged first? Welsh National Opera’s singers already know the music; WNO could co-produce it with another British house. New Zealand (Aotearoa) and Australia could mount it as a major antipodean project, a successor to the Jackson movies. America, too, is full of Tolkien fans; “Americans go in for fantasy books where you can hear the elves sing,” Terry Pratchett observed — and here they sing beautifully.

Godfrey suggested that the work either be done Saturday to Friday, or that it be done over a period of months or years.While six evenings might work in festival performances (including the Lays and the appendix Aragorn and Arwen), threeevenings would work better for most opera houses. 

The public thinks of The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy, and is more likely to buy tickets for three operas than six. They expect to travel from the Shire through the flight to the ford, Rivendell, Moria, Gandalf falling into the abyss, Lothlorien, the breaking of the Fellowship in one sitting — not for the flight to the ford to be the climax of the evening. Nor, given that LOTR is one story, does one want month-long intervals between each part. Jackson’s films were released annually, but were also available on DVD.

True, each evening would be long, but audiences binge television and attend 12-hour cinema marathon screenings of the extended LOTR, as well as longer franchises such as Harry Potter or the MCU. Theatre audiences routinely sit through works lasting up to eight hours (Gatz, Angels in America, The Inheritance).

LOTR is fast-paced, varied, and modular in construction, unlike Wagner’s symphonic arcs: each act is made up of several scenes. This provides natural re-entry cues should audience members leave the auditorium. The intervals could be placed as follows:

The Fellowship of the Ring

• A Long-Expected Party and The Return of the Shadow (1hr 19)
• INTERVAL
• Tom Bombadil; The Prancing Pony; The Flight to the Ford (1hr 32)
• INTERVAL
• The Council of Elrond; Farewell to Rivendell; A Journey in the Dark (1hr 37)
• INTERVAL
• The Mirror of Galadriel; The Breaking of the Fellowship (1hr 12)

The Two Towers

• The Plains and the Forest; The Riders of Rohan; The King of the Golden Hall (1hr 36)
• INTERVAL
• The Black Gate is Closed; The Window on the West; Cirith Ungol (1hr 50)
• INTERVAL
• The Journey to Isengard and The Voice of Saruman (1hr 06)

The Return of the King

• Minas Tirith; The Passing of the Grey Company; The Siege of Gondor; Pelennor Fields (1hr 47)
• INTERVAL
• The Houses of Healing and The Black Gate Opens (48 minutes)
• INTERVAL
• Mount Doom; The Field of Cormallen; The Steward and the King (1hr 41)
• INTERVAL
• Homeward Bound and The Scouring of the Shire (55 minutes)
• INTERVAL
• The Grey Havens (35 minutes)

The return of fantasy

A LOTR opera might seem a radical departure from the elegant farces, intimate naturalism, jagged modernism, political pieces, or contemporary social realism that make up much of the repertoire today — but fantasy, “the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown” (as Pratchett put it), was once central to opera. 

Consider the Greek myths and heroic romances of Baroque opera, with their paladins, sorceresses, monsters, transformations, and enchanted islands; Weber and Marschner’s vampires, demons, and earth spirits; the French opéra-féerie, in which djinns grant wishes, magic horses travel to the planet Venus, and people are transformed into statues; and Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov’s long-bearded dwarves, wizards and sorcerers, giant heads, snow maidens, underwater kingdoms, invisible cities, and talking poultry. What, in fact, are The Magic Flute, Der Ring des Nibelungen, Faust, Rusalka, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Le Grand Macabre if not fantasy?

LOTR, then, is not radical, but a return (of the king). If successful, it could make fantasy a viable subject for opera once again (as it already is for film and television), and bring in new opera audiences. 

A new operatic genre of serious fantasy could follow. The grotesque grandeur of Gormenghast, with its labyrinthine castle, candle-lit rituals, ambitious kitchen-boys, doomed love, fire and flood. A new Arthurian cyclein the form of The Once and Future King. Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, with its storm-rituals and supernatural dread. The Regency elegance, rival magicians, and faerie of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. The surreal phantasmagoria of The Neverending Story. The melancholy Bildungsroman of Hans Bemmann’s The Stone and the Flute. Guy Gavriel Kay’s “history with a quarter turn to the fantastic”, meat and drink for a modern-day Verdi. Jack Vance’s witty, sometimes tragic Lyonesse. The inevitable Game of Thrones opera. 

Comic opera, too: Discworld, the Oz books, James Branch Cabell, or Walter Moers — satire and farce, wit and whimsy, elegant irony, and unbridled imagination. 

What C. S. Lewis said in his review of Tolkien’s book might also apply to Godfrey’s adaptation:

This … is like lightning from a clear sky… To say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism is inadequate. To us, who live in that odd period, the return – and the sheer relief of it – is doubtless the important thing. But in the history of Romance itself – a history which stretches back to the Odyssey and beyond – it makes not a return but an advance or revolution: the conquest of new territory.

Conclusion

Is The Lord of the Rings, then, the work that modern opera has awaited for decades? I think it may very well be. 

This has every hallmark of being a guaranteed, cross-demographic smash hit: a fully thought-through grand opera dramatic cycle, based on a work half the planet knows, and sung in English; structurally intelligent, theatrically effective, vocally grateful, written by a composer who understands singers, chorus, stage rhythms, and audience psychology; combining 19^th century dramaturgy, late-Romantic symphonic writing, 20^th-century dramatic modernism, and 21^st-century pacing. This is the most exciting opera composed in years.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

Praise them! The Ring-bearers, praise them with great praise! Frodo, Samwise — and now Paul Corfield Godfrey. 

Further reading

• Paul Corfield Godfrey, The Lord of the Rings
• Paul Corfield Godfrey, Notes on the Tolkien Cycle: Thematic Analysis and Introduction
• Paul Corfield Godfrey, Interview with Jeroen Bakker (2007)
• Volante Opera Productions, The Lord of the Rings

Performers
Julian Boyce (baritone) – Samwise ‘Sam’ Gamgee
Edmond Choo (tenor) – Ted Sandyman, Glorfindel
Laurence Cole (bass) – Bill Ferny, Boromir, Denethor, The Voice of Sauron, Cirdan
Simon Crosby Buttle (tenor) – Frodo Baggins
Michael Clifton-Thompson (tenor) – Sméagol / Gollum
Gavin Davies (bass-baritone) – Glóin, Celeborn, Théoden
Dyfed Wyn Evans (baritone) – Meriadoc ‘Merry’ Brandybuck
David Fortey (tenor) – Peregrin ‘Pippin’ Took
Helen Greenaway (mezzo) – Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, Ioreth
Jasey Hall (bass) – Hamfast ‘Ham’ Gamgee, Dáin II, Anborn, The Voice of Sauron, Elladan, The Witch-king
Rosie Hay (soprano) – Gwaihir
Helen Jarmany (mezzo) – Éowyn
Rhodri Prys Jones (tenor) – Gildor Inglorion, Legolas, The Minstrel
Howard Kirk (baritone) – The Stranger, Odo Proudfoot, Tom Bombadil, Galdor, Haldir, Éothain, Quickbeam, Hob Hayward
Emma Mary Llewellyn (soprano) – Goldberry, Arwen, The Voice of Elbereth
Huw Llewellyn (tenor) – Bilbo Baggins, Éomer
Gareth Lloyd (tenor) – Saruman
Martin Lloyd (bass) – Treebeard, The Herb Master
Philip Lloyd-Evans (baritone) – Gandalf
Steffan Loyd-Evans (tenor) – Snaga
Gareth Long (bass) – Gimli
Alastair Moore (baritone) – Daddy Twofoot, Rory Brandybuck, Déagol, Uglúk, Háma, Damrod, Gorbag, Beregond, Soldier, Farmer Cotton
Angharad Morgan (soprano) – Galadriel
George Newton-Fitzgerald (bass) – Barliman Butterbur, Khamûl, Ceorl, Elrohir
Louise Ratcliffe (mezzo) – Lindir
Francesca Saracino (mezzo) – King of the Dead
James Schouten (tenor) – Elrond, Faramir
Owen Webb (baritone) – Old Noakes, Otho Sackville-Baggins, Mablung, Halbarad, Imrahil
Stephen Wells (bass-baritone) – Strider / Aragorn
Peter Wilman (tenor) – Everard Took, Grishnákh, Wormtongue, Shagrat, Ingold, Tracker
Sophie Yelland (mezzo) – The Barrow-Wight