Scotch Corner

For many years, I was involved with Scottish Opera, a company based in Glasgow, but touring its productions around Scotland both at full scale, although the number of suitable theatres for this is limited, and on the small scale, sometimes with just a handful of singers and a piano, in which case, any village hall or community centre can be turned into a mini opera house. As Director of Public Relations, I frequently had to give an answer to curious enthusiasts who asked why the company did not perform more opera with obvious Scottish connections, and although my response was always that Scottish Opera was an international opera company which happened to be based in Scotland, rather than a local company dedicated to promoting anything with a hint of tartan regardless of its merit, I did have a great deal of sympathy with the question. True, Scottish Opera did mount productions of Verdi’s Macbeth and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor within the first fourteen years of its existence, but this could hardly be regarded as anything like a policy to perform major works which are actually set in Scotland, let alone based on stories by Scottish writers. The company did perform works by contemporary Scottish composers such as Robin Orr, John Purser, Iain Hamilton, Thomas Wilson and Thea Musgrave, and that certainly was a policy, and many of their works were commissioned by Scottish Opera. But there were works which did have Scottish connections which were either underplayed or ignored (such as Berlioz’s Les Troyens, Wagner’s Der Fliegende Höllander and even the opera with which the company launched itself in 1962, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly). I enjoyed many robust discussions with my colleagues on the artistic side and the administrative side of the company (although those on the financial side rarely saw the point) about what composers or works with a Scottish connection might be included in the repertoire, but by and large, I failed in my mission. So the Scotch Corner section of OperaStory aims to make good that failure by exploring the whole world of opera and seeking out Scottish connections. Some of them are very obvious; others are fairly obscure; some are almost unbelievable, but all of them are true: there is a whole world of Scottish links – so pour yourself a glass of something with a Scottish link, sit back, and I hope that you enjoy reading the Scotch Corner articles as much as I have enjoyed researching them.
The mysterious librettist Fiona Macleod and the operatic world record

The mysterious librettist Fiona Macleod and the operatic world record

A young English composer named Rutland Boughton had a brilliant idea in 1912. Inspired by a Celtic drama entitled The Immortal Hour written by a Fiona Macleod, he had an article published in the Daily Mirror newspaper inviting interested people to sign up to rehearse and perform in a new opera which he was writing…...

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The murder of David Rizzio: Jules Massenet and the blood-stained floor in the Scottish Royal Palace

The murder of David Rizzio: Jules Massenet and the blood-stained floor in the Scottish Royal Palace

Sometimes, the operatic links with Scotland explored in the Scotch Corner articles in OperaStory will be pretty obvious – but some operatic links with Scotland can be fairly obscure, and this one linking the French composer Jules Massenet to Mary Queen of Scots is certainly in that category. It comes from the composer’s student days…...

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Swirling Scotch Mist: Etienne-Nicholas Méhul’s Uthal (with no strings attached)

Swirling Scotch Mist: Etienne-Nicholas Méhul’s Uthal (with no strings attached)

Méhul’s opera Uthal is set to a libretto by Jacques Maximilien Benjamin Bins de Saint-Victor (apparently his only foray into the world of libretto writing) loosely based on the poem Berrathon, the final poem in the first volume of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, purporting to be by a centuries-old Scottish writer. Towards the end of…...

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Sir Donald Tovey’s The Bride of Dionysus – dismal failure, or a lost Scottish gem?

Sir Donald Tovey’s The Bride of Dionysus – dismal failure, or a lost Scottish gem?

This Scotch Corner article considers a curious opera which was born and died in Scotland, which should have been much better than it was, and which links together two unusual men – Sir Donald Tovey, Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh for twenty-six years, and his friend Robert Calverley Trevelyan, a ‘rumpled,…...

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Rossini and The Lady of the Lake

Rossini and The Lady of the Lake

The tartan spotlight in this Scotch Corner article is on the young Gioacchino Rossini. He was probably the first composer to base an opera on any of the works of Sir Walter Scott (any other contenders are welcome to prove this statement wrong). The opera La donna del lago, ‘The Lady of the Lake’, is…...

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Ossian operas

Ossian operas

The efforts of the Scottish hoaxer James Macpherson to persuade the world that his discovery of epic narratives by a Gaelic bard named Ossian was genuine were remarkably successful for a very long time. Even after the hoax was uncovered, Ossian enthusiasts were not deterred and continued doggedly to believe in the authenticity of the…...

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Nixon in China and the Scottish connection

Nixon in China and the Scottish connection

The Scottish link with John Adams’s 1987 opera Nixon in China is the University of Aberdeen and concerns two students, brothers named Yang Tseng-Kao and Yang Chang-Zi. They were the sons of Yang Shang-Lo and were born in Changsha in China. Yang Tseng-Kao was the older, and his younger brother was born in 1880. This…...

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Mascagni’s Isabeau: Ubaldo and Ethelberto – are these traditional Scottish names?

Mascagni’s Isabeau: Ubaldo and Ethelberto – are these traditional Scottish names?

Isabeau, composed in 1911 and first performed in the Coliseo in Buenos Aires, was the tenth of Pietro Mascagni’s sixteen operas, and it is the most peculiar. It tells the story of a king’s daughter who has deliberately chosen to live a chaste life. But her father, urged on by a minister who is concerned…...

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Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff: ghostly lovers north of Inverness

Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff: ghostly lovers north of Inverness

Mascagni is best known for Cavalleria Rusticana, but the opera which he loved most of the sixteen which he wrote was Guglielmo Ratcliff, which is set in Scotland. In fact, he was so obsessed by the idea of writing a four-act opera that he almost passed up the opportunity to write a one-act opera for…...

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Loch Loomond and the mountains of Kenth – far beyond the reach of the censor

Loch Loomond and the mountains of Kenth – far beyond the reach of the censor

Verdi’s relationship with the censor was never comfortable, and the effect that the censor had on Rigoletto, for instance, was typical of the kind of interference that the composer had to put up with in virtually every opera that he wrote. In a series of attempts to fend off the censor’s demands, Rigoletto was converted…...

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Learmont Drysdale: the Red Spider strikes!

Learmont Drysdale: the Red Spider strikes!

In Scotch Corner article number 8, the spotlight is on Hamish MacCunn, a truly Scottish composer whose main completed operatic works were very Scottish indeed. But MacCunn was not the only Scottish composer trying to create a national operatic tradition at the end of the nineteenth century. One of his contemporaries was Learmont Drysdale, and…...

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James Macpherson, Massenet, Werther and Ossian – a Scotch Myth

James Macpherson, Massenet, Werther and Ossian – a Scotch Myth

This Scottish operatic link is a peculiar one, and stems from Goethe’s enthusiasm for a piece of literary deception by a wily Scotsman. It links Massenet’s opera Werther with a completely non-existent but extremely influential ancient Scottish bard – Ossian. The Ossian fraud fooled many people for many years (including Napoleon, who was fascinated by…...

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Hamish MacCunn’s Jeanie Deans and Diarmid both save the day (both helped by the Duke of Argyll)

Hamish MacCunn’s Jeanie Deans and Diarmid both save the day (both helped by the Duke of Argyll)

If you want a Scottish-born and genuinely Scottish-sounding composer as the operatic hero of Scotch Corner and a genuinely Scottish opera story as the subject of the opera, then you need look no further that Hamish MacCunn: he completed two operas, Jeanie Deans and Diarmid, both intensely Scottish in character; he also wrote an operetta,…...

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Franco Alfano and some double cross-dressing in Kilmarnock

Franco Alfano and some double cross-dressing in Kilmarnock

Franco Alfano has been principally known as the composer who provided the ending for Puccini’s Turandot after Puccini’s death, but his contribution to opera is much greater than that. Alfano has recently begun to come into his own as a composer after so many years of being confined to the footnotes of biographies of Puccini…....

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Eugène d’Albert, Glasgow’s reluctant son

Eugène d’Albert, Glasgow’s reluctant son

Most opera composers born in Scotland are proud of their heritage, but Eugène d’Albert is the exception. Local legend has it that d’Albert was born in the Charing Cross Hotel in Glasgow, long ago demolished to make room for an underground motorway cutting right through the Charing Cross area at the west end of the…...

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Carmen’s Scottish cousin: Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie and Colomba

Carmen’s Scottish cousin: Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie and Colomba

What is the connection between Bizet’s Carmen and Scotland? Well, not much really, but there is one, so pour yourself a wee glass of the hard stuff, settle down in a comfortable chair and read on. Bizet’s Carmen, written in 1875, was based on a short story by the French writer Prosper Merimée, but Merimée…...

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Boieldieu’s White Lady reveals all

Boieldieu’s White Lady reveals all

Scottish peasants on mountain tops communicating with one another by rustic horns, long-lost children, a ghost, an exciting auction and a full-blown villain. What’s not to like? Boieldieu cobbled together elements of various novels by Sir Walter Scott and came up with La dame blanche ‘The White Lady’. Scorned by some and adored by others,…...

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Berwick upon Tweed – operatic gateway to Italy

Berwick upon Tweed – operatic gateway to Italy

Handel’s great opera Ariodante, which is based on an incident in Lodovico Ariosto’s rambling epic of chivalry and adventure Orlando Furioso, is the only one of Handel’s thirty-odd operas which is set anywhere in the British Isles – it is in fact set in Scotland – so it is an ideal candidate for Scotch Corner,…...

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An operatic haggis and The Fair Maid of Perth

An operatic haggis and The Fair Maid of Perth

Bizet’s opera La Jolie Fille de Perth, based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Fair Maid of Perth, obviously has an impeccable Scottish pedigree, despite the mess that its librettists made of it. There is, however, something extra in that opera which makes it even more especially Scottish, since it contains what must surely be…...

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Alexander Mackenzie and Charles Dickens

Alexander Mackenzie and Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol is one of Charles Dickens’s best-known and best-loved stories, but it is only one of a number of short stories which Dickens wrote for publication at Christmas time. Another of them, equally heart-warming and Christmassy, was The Cricket on the Hearth, and this was a story which attracted several opera composers, including…...

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