Scottish opera is a subgenre of Scottish music. This article deals with three separate, but overlapping subjects: Opera on Scottish themes, subject matter, or inspired by Scottish writers Opera by Scottish (-based) composers Opera in Scotland, including performers, production personnel, and opera companies, etc.
A number of operas have been set in Scotland, or based around Scottish themes, but the number of notable operas written by Scots is far lower. Their actual connection to Scotland varies greatly.
Searching for its typical and characteristic features, Scottish opera (and Scottish classical music as a whole), has often been under strong foreign influence. Italian, French, English and German operas have served as models, even when composers sought to introduce characteristically national elements into their work. This dualism, to a greater or lesser degree, has persisted throughout the whole history of Scottish opera.
The Italian style of classical music was probably first brought to Scotland by the Italian cellist and composer Lorenzo Bocchi, who travelled to Scotland in the 1720s, introducing the cello to the country and then developing settings for lowland Scots songs. He possibly had a hand in the first Scottish Opera, the pastoral The Gentle Shepherd, with libretto by the poet Allan Ramsay.Cowgill and Holman, "Introduction: Centres and Peripheries", p. 4
The most significant figure in Scottish classical music of the mid-eighteenth century was Thomas Erskine, 6th Earl of Kellie (1732–81), whose chamber music was frequently performed at the time, but quickly forgotten after his death and has only just begun to be reappraised.Garlington, pp. 19 – 20 Growing audiences for classical music can be seen from the drawing up of a constitution for The Musical Society of Edinburgh in 1728Farmer, pp.309–10 and the opening of a new 2,200 square feet, oval concert hall for the Society in the shape of St Cecilia's Hall, Niddry Street, Edinburgh, in 1762.Butler, p. 115
From the late-Victorian period onwards, opera-loving Scots had to make do with the offerings of small or family-based companies that toured extensively throughout the British Isles. What the standards were like in those days long before recording can only be imagined. However the creation in 1873 of the Liverpool-based Carl Rosa Opera Company was hailed at the time as offering touring opera of an ambition and standard never before seen in Scotland. Perhaps the most detailed account of the travelling opera phenomenon of that time is offered by Rodmell.Rodmell, P. (2013). 'Opera in the British Isles, 1875–1918' Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Clearly this exposure to travelling opera must have done a significant amount to form public taste.
However, despite the impressive strides in historical research that have been made here and elsewhere, the quantity of performances and companies in Scotland is not known in much detail. Establishing the facts is labour-intensive and problematic. Digitisation of newspapers, magazines and other print media helps researchers in some respects but nationally this process is still a long way from being complete. Performing companies and even theatres have mainly been temporary phenomena and their performance records are almost always lost. The best archives are found where companies or venues have not only survived, but maintained their own records. Prominent musical examples are in New York the Metropolitan Opera; and in London the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the Royal Albert Hall.
Memoirs, even those of impresarios, tend to be long in anecdote and short of detail. Little or nothing survives of their business records to enable estimates of attendance, for example. National and local libraries and even specialist archives of performing arts material tend to hold only a haphazard handful of programmes or other memorabilia.
For Scotland the task is more challenging. Attempts must therefore be made to identify and build the detail of early performances and casts using mainly newspaper reviews, programmes and playbills. An ambitious attempt to pursue this online, and unique in trying to work nationally rather than in relation to a single company, is that of OperaScotland, a website for listings and performance history. Current content runs from 1755 to the present day, includes 650 operas and the names of over 11,000 performers. Much remains to be found, however.Brooke, Ian (2014) 'Brothers' Labour of Love for Opera Fans' Brio, Scottish Opera, Glasgow (13), 10.
Operas on Scottish themes or subjects Professor Alexander Weatherson, writing in the February 2009 Donizetti Society Newsletter, notes the following (with the addition of relevant opera titles associated with the named composers): Scotland's soil was about to be profaned by a stream of operas that bore the footprint of [ Elizabeth's ] rival......without Mary Stuart, Scotland might have been left in peace....In Italy alone in the earliest decades of the nineteenth century there was a Scotch broth of operas by Asap; Capecelatro [Davide Rizzio]; Carafa [I solitari di Scozia, 1815, and Elisabetta in Derbyshire ossia Il castello di Fotheringhay, 1818]; Carlini [Maria Stuarda, regina di Scozia, 1818]; Casalini; Casella [Maria Stuarda, 1812]; Coccia [I solitari, 1811, and Maria Stuart, regina di Scozia, 1827]; Donizetti [the subject of the Newsletter article]; Ferrari; [The Belgian], Fétis [Marie Stuart en Ecosse]; Gabrielli [Sara ovvero La pazza delle montagne di Scozia, 1843]; Mazzucato [La fidanzata di Lammermoor, 1834]; Mercadante [Maria Stuarda, regina di Scozia, 1825]; Niedermeyer [Marie Stuart, Paris 1844]; Nicolini; Pacini [Vallace, 1820, Malvina di Scozia]; Pavesi; Pugni; Rajentroph; the Ricchis [ Federico Ricci and Luigi Ricci ] [La prigione di Edimburgo, 1838]; Rossini [Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra, 1815]; Sogner [Maria Stuarda ossia I carbonari di Scozia, 1814]; and Vaccai [I solitari di Scozia, 1815] – and this is just a scratch upon the surface of the European infatuation with the decapitated Stuart and/or her northern fastness which boiled-up in the bloodbath finale of the eighteenth century, operas often rabid and inconsequential, full of fashionable confrontations and artificial conflicts, politically motivated, repetitious and soon forgotten.Weatherson, "The Stuarts and their kith and kin", Donizetti Society (London), Newsletter No. 106, February 2009
Other notable non-Scottish composers of operas on Scottish subjects include Bizet, Handel, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Jean-François Le Sueur, John Barnett and Giuseppe Verdi. Richard Wagner originally set the action of his music drama The Flying Dutchman in Scotland, but changed the location to Norway shortly before its premiere staged in Dresden in January 1843.T S Grey, Richard Wagner, Der Fliegende Holländer, Cambridge University Press 2000, p.2 and p.170
Barnett, John – The Mountain Sylph Carafa, Michele – I solitari di Scozia 1815, La prison d'Édimbourg (1833) Casalini Coccia, Carlo – I solitari 1811; Edoardo in Iscozia (o Edoardo Stuart re in Iscozia) Ferrari, [The Belgian] Gabrielli, Nicolò – Sara ovvero La pazza delle montagne di Scozia, 1843 Handel's – Ariodante Marschner, Heinrich – Der Vampyr Meyerbeer, Giacomo – Margherita d'Anjou Nicolini, Giuseppe Pacini – Vallace, 1820 (about William Wallace), Allan Cameron and Malvina di Scozia Pavesi, Stefano Pugni, Cesare – Ricciarda di Edimburgo (Melodramma serio in 2 acts, libretto by Callisto Bassi). Teatro Grande, Trieste, 29 September 1832. Rossini and Louis Niedermeyer – Robert Bruce, pastiche opera Vaccai, Nicola – I solitari di Scozia, 1815, Malvina Verdi – Aroldo (1857) A revision of his 1850 Stiffelio with a Scottish setting, and "some hints from Walter Scott".
There is also Pacini's Maria, regina d'Inghilterra of 1843 which is about Mary I of England (Mary Tudor).
But Weatherson concludes: At the heart of the plot, however, lay an Italian, the pulp plays and novels of Camillo Federici (1749–1802) [the pen name of Giovanni Battista Viassolo] a former actor whose prolific vulgarisations of Schiller and Kotzebue set Italian librettists scribbling for four decades.After his death, the publication of his works was completed in 14 volumes in 1816. Another edition in 26 volumes was published at Florence between 1826 and 1827. Indeed, without him it is to be suspected that Sir Walter Scott would never have captured the imagination of so many poets, nor for so long.
Mary, Queen of Scots
The subject of Mary, Queen of Scots was a common one. Usually the operas dealt with the section of her life when she was being persecuted by Elizabeth I of England. She was considered a sympathetic character in southern Europe due to her Catholicism.
In a 2001 article, "Mary Stuart and the opera in her honour by Carlo Coccia", Professor Alexander Weatherson writes: No one could complain that Italy had ever abandoned Mary Stuart. Theatrically speaking she had shown a marked resilience but not really on account of her spiritual perfection. It was as a political symbol that she had captured the imagination of Italian radicals and their kith and kin. In the earliest years of the nineteenth century performances of Alfieri's (1780) and Schiller's (1801) far-fetched historical plays staged in her honour rubbed shoulders with a lesser political layer. Thus a dim "Maria Stuarda restituita dai Carbonari", for example, a rag-bag of fact and fiction that somehow managed to bridge the gap between fervent Catholicism and Jacobin wishful-thinking, found a place among a host of similar popularist plays that included August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue's "Edoardo Stuart in Scozia" and the screaming tabloids "Il principe Eugenio all'assedio di Tamisvar" and "Il trionfo di Napoleone il Grande" aimed directly at a credulous public. They shared the footlights with an even more imaginative "Matilde ossia I Carbonari" in 1809 – which presented the unhappy queen with a fictitious daughter (who too would figure, rather later, in Rossini's "Elisabetta regina d'Inghilterra" but shorn of any disloyal aspects) – as well as a cut-price "I carbonari di Dombar" (i.e. Dunbar) of similar construction.
All these ephemeral plays had something in common, and were favoured by a dissident public. Needless to say, it was not long before this "Jacobin" Queen of Scotland was given a musical setting: Pietro Casella's "Maria Stuarda" (Florence, April 1812) was prudent enough, but Pasquale Sogner's "Maria Stuarda ossia I carbonari di Scozia" (Venice, 26 December 1814) – omitting to name the poet – sparked-off a political row, which was soon stamped-out by the newly installed Austrians in Venice who put a stop to all such provocation, as they saw it to be. When the Neapolitan Michele Carafa staged his "Elisabetta in Derbyshire ossia Il castello di Fotheringhay" with a libretto by Antonio Peracchi at La Fenice on 26 December 1818 (based upon Schiller), the maestro took care not to upset anyone with either its title or its text (only with some of its spelling), while Saverio Mercadante, whose "Maria Stuarda, regina di Scozia" with a text by the Venice-based Gaetano Rossi (Bologna, 29 May 1821), though not more than obliquely dependent upon these sources, took care accordingly to stage it as far away from Naples as possible.Alexander Weatherson, "Queen of dissent: Mary Stuart and the opera in her honour by Carlo Coccia", Donizetti Society (London), 2001
Other depictions in opera
Capecelatro, Vincenzo David Riccio : 2-act drama, with prologue (1849) music by (1850) (David Rizzio) Carlini – Maria Stuarda, regina di Scozia, 1818 Casella – Maria Stuarda, 1812 Coccia, Carlo Maria Stuart, regina di Scozia, 1827 Donizetti – Maria Stuarda Fétis, François-Joseph – Marie Stuart en Ecosse Mercadante, Saverio – Maria Stuarda, regina di Scozia, 1825 Musgrave, Thea – Mary, Queen of Scots 1977.