Mary, Queen of Scots, ENO, 15 February 2025

Coliseum

Images: Ellie Kurttz
Queen Mary (Heidi Stober)

Queen Mary – Heidi Stober
James Stewart, Earl of Moray – Alex Otterburn
Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley – Rupert Charlesworth
James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell – John Findon
David Riccio – Barnaby Rea
Cardinal Beaton – Darren Jeffery
Lord Gordon – Alastair Miles
Earl of Ruthven – Ronald Samm
Earl of Morton – Jolyon Loy
Mary Seton – Jenny Stafford
Mary Beaton – Monica McGhee
Mary Livingston – Felicity Buckland
Mary Fleming – Siān Griffiths

Director, designs – Stewart Laing
Associate costume designs – Mady Berry
Lighting – D.M. Wood

Choreography – Alex McCabe  

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus director: Matthew Quinn)  

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Joana Carneiro (conductor)

Written to the composer’s own libretto based on Amalia Elguera’s unpublished play Moray – direct collaboration having proved difficult – Thea Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots has had, by contemporary operatic standards, rather a happy history since its 1977 Edinburgh premiere. It has reached various stages in the United Kingdom, United States and Germany. Last year, a new production was mounted in Leipzig. Now, in co-production with San Francisco Opera, it receives its premiere at ENO. It may have seemed a bold step for the company in its current, parlous condition, yet it was rewarded with both an artistic success and something approaching a full house. It was a delight to see the composer, approaching 97, in the audience and receiving justly warm and prolonged applause. 

Earl of Bothwell (Barnaby Rea), James Stewart (Alex Otterburn), Mary

People can create, perform, and appreciate successful art regardless of personal circumstances; there nevertheless seems something apt for a Scottish woman who received part of her education in France (studying with Nadia Boulanger) who thereafter spent much of her life, if not in exile then working in another English-speaking country (the USA), to have written an opera on this theme. If it does not fall into the category of experimental opera, seeking to reinvent or reimagine the genre, to expand its theatrical and/or musical boundaries; nor is it seeking to do so, without proving self-consciously archaising. Mary Queen of Scots is rather a highly competent, engaging work which, in its three acts, come across as the equal of many an accomplished work by the likes of Britten or even, in some moods, Henze. In musical dramaturgy, if hardly language, the opera takes its place more in a line from Verdi than Wagner. Musgrave is equally, palpably adept at many of the classic set pieces and expectations of the genre, evoking with similar sureness requirements and shifts in general atmosphere, music for dancing, and crowd scenes set against individual feeling. Turning inwards for an aria, in which certain instrumentation colours a character’s – and our – response, music and drama might be understood as traditionally operatic, without pushing any particular aesthetic as to what anything other than itself should be.

Likewise, a broadly tonal musical language sounds straightforwardly to be what it is, rather than self-consciously reinstating tonality—or anything else. I could sense a mind at work planning its musical structure in tandem with the drama, without bringing that modernistically to the fore. The ENO Orchestra and (a regrettably thinned down) Chorus under conductor Joana Carneiro were surely instrumental to realising this success. One would never have had the sense this was not a repertory work they had been playing for years—save, perhaps for the keen sense of discovery. We felt, even knew, we were in safe hands, though. 

The cast was, of course, similarly crucial to such achievement. Heidi Stober gave a touching, multi-faceted performance in the title role, in no evident sense bound by the expectations such a portrayal must necessarily greet. One felt in her plight the twin demands of life and fate ground tragically by politics low and high. Alex Otterburn’s quicksilver James Stewart proved nicely enigmatic. If there remained a nagging suspicion one should dislike the character more than one did, that stood testament to the artists’ gift for bringing alive both the character and his own necessities. Rupert Charlesworth had one properly despise Darnley in his amoral weakness. I struggled somewhat to gain the measure of the Earl of Bothwell, but that seemed to be more inherent in the drama, perhaps the staging too, than in John Findon’s well-sung performance. Darren Jeffery’s Cardinal Beaton and Barnaby Rea’s Riccio were clearly, vividly presented; not that the two have much in common beyond that. Smaller roles were all well taken, rebuking the idea that one can, let alone should, uproot a company such as ENO and dump it somewhere else; such depth comes from building on a living tradition, not that the Arts Council has idea or interest in such an idea. 

David Riccio (Barnaby Rea), Lord Darnley (Rupert Charlesworth), James Stewart

Stewart Laing’s production was at best a mixed bag, though that may in part have been a matter of limited resources. If it tried to do more with a broadly comparable black-box space than Ruth Knight had for Britten’s Gloriana in 2022, Knight’s caution emerged all the wiser. A marquee was built and taken down with considerable noise: a metaphor, no doubt, yet one that added little. Other than that, we had strangely inappropriate costumes, their lack of social differentiation was puzzling. Warm anoraks were the thing across the board, perhaps because the opera is set in Scotland, although, especially in crowd scenes, we appeared to be closer to the world of The Flying Dutchman. If the idea – and I think it may have been – was to evoke twentieth-century Protestant-Catholic sectarianism, then it might have been more rigorously applied, strange exceptions throwing the whole thing into disarray, unaided by other aspects of the staging. To be fair, though, one could certainly understand why Mary would only have returned to this Scotland with the greatest of reluctance; it was difficult to imagine how what we saw would have been worth a mass, a Lord’s Supper, or anything else. 

Cardinal Beaton (Darren Jeffery)

I could not understand why Alastair Miles’s dour yet honest Lord Gordon wore a dog collar; let alone why, if so, he should be dressed more as Presbyterian minister than Catholic priest. But then his part in the drama more generally seemed strange on any discernible historical terms, not least in his stabbing of James Stewart (as the Earl of Moray is referred to). Conflation of characters, however much it may pain historians, is far from an unusual dramatic device; if we go down this route, we shall be here all day. This nonetheless remained a perplexing choice. Bothwell’s rape of Mary nevertheless registered in duly horrifying fashion. I do not know the work itself well enough – indeed at all, other than from this performance – to be sure whether the nature of the act is originally so clear. I sensed there might be a suggestion of greater ambiguity, though that may be entirely wrong. In any case, there none here; it cast its dark, terrible shadow over all that remained to be shown.

Turandot, Deutsche Oper, 12 December 2014

Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Turandot – Catherine Foster

Altoum – Peter Maus

Calaf – Kamen Chanev

Liù – Heidi Stober

Timur – Simon Lim

Ping – Melih Tepretmez

Pang – Gideon Poppe

Pong – Matthew Newlin

Mandarin – Andrew Harris

Prince of Persia – Aristoteles Chaitidis, Jan Müller

Two Girls – Elbenita Kajtaz, Christina Sidak

Lorenzo Fioroni (director)

Claudia Gotta (revival director)

Paul Zoller (set designs and video)

Katharina Gault (costumes)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper (chorus master: William Spaulding) of the Deutsche Oper

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper

Ivan Repušič (conductor)

Production shot from first staging:  © Bettina Stöß, 2008 

The Deutsche Oper has a very fine production of Turandot on its hands. Lorenzo Fioroni leaves us in no doubt what a magnificently vile opera it is, homing in quite rightly upon Puccini’s sadism, drawing out its political implications, and playing down, though far from entirely obscuring, the work’s deeply problematical Orientalism, which otherwise has a tendency to impede appreciation of what is still more repellent in the work. Put another way, this staging stands as distant from Zeffirelli and mindless school thereof, that is, from what has given opera in performance so bad a name, as Puccini does from Donizetti and the other drivel that has given Italian opera so bad a name and which, sadly, has in may houses relegated Puccini’s œuvre to the level of at-best-anodyne productions, cynically relied upon to boost the accursed box office.

Fioroni sets the action in a reasonably generic totalitarian state. There is enough of an imaginary ‘China’ hinted at, should that be important, but it is not central to the production. An enfeebled Emperor – or is he? is his present state partly a ruse de guerre? – presides, with the help of Turandot, a deeply sinister junta or Politburo (according to taste), and thuggish security services on the street, who mete out casual, or rather less-than-casual, physical punishment to those who would step out of line. Turandot appears to be calling the shots – almost literally, in some cases; for instance, when, following the solution of the riddles, she hysterically reaches for and uses her gun – but, as in all such cases, the dynamics of power and violence are not entirely straightforward. The crowd seems submissive, largely cowed, relishing yet fearing the brutality, but who knows? Ping, Pang, and Pong are now less an offensive and/or irritating addition, but political opportunists. They, like everyone else, do what they need to survive; they are not inhuman, but necessity and the promise of reward ensure collaboration and perhaps more than that.

Theatre is extremely important here. What we see enacted and re-enacted takes us to the heart of the problem, as indeed it does in Gozzi’s original tale. Ritual is enforced but also permits of certain criticism. Ping, Pong, and Pang, those crucial ministers – more crucial, I think, than I have seen before – employ the costumes and customs of theatre to show the people and us what the rules are and what the outcomes will be. Their tableaux involve impersonation, most notably in the case of a gender-subverting portrayal of Turandot herself, veiled and later preparing for a wedding; they also, inevitably, remind us all of the likely bloody outcome of any challenge to the system. And yet, they shift, chameleon-like, when the new order comes: a new order brutally signalled by the death of the Emperor and, most chillingly of all, Calaf’s stabbing of his father immediately after. Regime change has come upon us – and the courtiers, whatever their sly mocking when unseen, will adapt and most likely prosper.

The most shocking violence, of course, whether in work or production, is that suffered by Liù. Her enslavement, born of both social position and gender, is clear from the outset, when Calaf briefly forces himself upon her, making a great deal more sense of his actions in the third act. It is power in all senses that he wants; a moment of regret is all that is therefore necessary. Yet her figure, hanging in front of the action throughout the rest of the act, reminds us of the cost and the barbarism. ‘Love’, whatever that means, may claim to have won, but we know that it is merely a form of power, or rather that it is perhaps the most deadly form of power at all. (Coincidentally or otherwise, Wagner’s discovery of that truth during the writing of the Ring comes to mind.) The cruelty of the score, of its ritualisation and exploitation, is at one with what we see. For a view of the violence as not only instrumental but concerned with degradation of the body for its own sake chimes very much with Puccini’s fabled sadism. This, then, is a fidelity to the work that draws out what is present in it, a fidelity greater than that which the cheerleaders of a naïve Werktreue seem capable of understanding.

It was a pity, then, that Ivan Repušič’s conducting was not up to the same standard. There was nothing too much to worry about, but this was competent and, sometimes, a little frayed rather than clearly directed. The Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper played magnificently, though, so the occasional blurring did not detract so very much in practice. Nevertheless, a more incisive, indeed brazenly modernistic touch would have heightened the disturbed and disturbing sensations further. Choral singing lay almost beyond praise. William Spaulding’s training of the Deutsche Oper Chorus is well known, but still deserving of the highest plaudits; so, of course, is the contribution of the choral singers themselves. Keenly directed on stage as they were here, the heft, clarity, and meaning of their musical contribution was very much of a piece with their ambiguous yet threatening dramatic role. This was a mass that more than stirred musically, hinting perhaps at trouble to come for the new regime?

In the title role, Catherine Foster offered a committed dramatic portrayal, sadistic yet clearly hinting at great problems, personal and political, lying behind the sadism. If one could hardly empathise, one could begin to understand – which is just about all one can ask with this repellent character and her actions. Intonation was not always all it might have been, but for the most part there was dramatic compensation. Kamen Chanev’s Calaf was not dramatically subtle; such seems, alas, to be the way with the role. But the production, for which revival director, Claudia Gotta, surely also deserves plaudits, offered depth to what, in purely vocal terms, was an impressive performance. Simon Lim’s Timur was deeply felt, however, attention to words and musical line impressing throughout. Likewise, Heidi Stober’s Liù, which gained in resonance – in more than one sense – as the evening progressed. As the ministerial trio, Melih Tepretmez, Gideon Poppe, and Matthew Newlin all offered cleverly considered performances, alert to the shifting circumstances on stage and responding accordingly. The company and the performance as a whole proved more than the sum of its parts. A DVD release would be invaluable, especially for those misled – often understandably so – by more typical, inert presentations of Puccini.