Conchubor comes to Slieve Fuadh to bring Deirdre to his palace, Emain Macha, ignoring her pleas to remain in the countryside for another year.
Deirdre nearly convinces him to put aside past grievances and let them live in peace when the sound of a battle between Conchubor's men and Naoise's brothers reaches them.
Lavarcham tries to convince Deirdre to flee Ulster, and Conchubor tries to take her to a different castle, but she stays and mourns her dead lover and his brothers.
The play (along with Irish legend in general) enjoyed a vogue amongst composers in the earlier part of the 20th century[3] and many of them set Deirdre of the Sorrows to music.
The first was Italo-Irish composer Michele Esposito in the cantata for soloists, mixed chorus and orchestra, Deirdre (1902) on a text by Thomas William Rolleston.
Arnold Bax's orchestral tone poem Into the Twilight (1908) was originally conceived as the overture to a 5-act opera on the Deirdre theme that never materialised.
[4] A number of composers turned the subject into an opera including Fritz Hart, Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer, Cecil Gray, Havergal Brian, Healey Wlllan and Karl Rankl.
Palmer's Deirdre of the Sorrows (1925) to a libretto by William Mervyn Crofton was initially unfinished, then completed by Staf Gebruers around 1930, but never performed.
Karl Rankl completed his opera on the play in 1951, commissioned by the Arts Council for the Festival of Britain, though the BBC and Covent Garden failed to perform the piece.