60 Years of Scottish Opera Pt1: 1962-1985
One of the first things to note is that the 60th anniversary of the founding of Scottish Opera should have been last year in 2021. The founding fathers of the company (and they were indeed all men in those days) had drawn up quite a detailed financial breakdown of what was to be the first season of the fledgling company in 1961, with an estimated deficit of £1713, but the application for funding to the Scottish Committee of the Arts Council was turned down on the grounds that it had been submitted too late for the annual budget. Bureaucratic incompetence was a feature then as now! Nothing daunted, a new season was drawn up, with three planned performances each of Debussy’s ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ and Puccini’s ‘Madama Butterfly’.
The rest, as they say, is history.
I like to think I have been involved with the company throughout much of its history, but that is a very moot point as you will discover. I was only six years old when the company was founded, but three people link me to that first season. Richard Telfer and Alexander Gibson were two of the founders of the company, and Laura Sarti sang Geneviève. As I write, Laura is the only surviving participant from 1962, still going strong in Lewes in Sussex at the age of 98! Richard Telfer, whose idea it was to stage ‘Pelléas’, was my music teacher at George Watson’s College in the 1960s but was far more than a simple schoolteacher. A student of French music in particular, Richard had studied in Paris when younger, also acting as a tourist guide, and on his return to Edinburgh, was famed for his performances on the Mighty Wurlitzer at the Playhouse Cinema. He was manager of the Assembly Hall during the Edinburgh Festival, and became Company Manager of the fledgling Scottish Opera. Softly spoken, a confirmed bachelor, mild mannered, the epitome of a Morningside gentleman, Richard was a great mentor to me at school. Second in command to Norman Hyde, who barely tolerated me as someone not studying music but who could sing, it was Richard who awarded me the Moonie Memorial Singing Prize in 1971, setting me on the path to be a professional singer. I wish he could have lived to see some of my successes – at least he saw me singing with Scottish Opera, his creation, in 1982.
It was at Scottish Opera that I met Alexander Gibson when I was engaged as company soloist from 1982-1985. He had been knighted in 1977 and was universally known as “Siralec”. He had been precocious as a young man and was appointed Musical Director of Sadler’s Wells Opera in London in 1957, the youngest incumbent of that post. In 1959, he returned to Scotland as Principal Conductor of the Scottish National Orchestra and was co-founder of Scottish Opera in 1962. Almost the opposite of Richard Telfer in personality, Gibson was charismatic, abrasive, driven and immensely talented. Particularly drawn to Scandinavian music, he was a great advocate of the music of Sibelius and excelled in the work of such diverse composers as Berlioz, Puccini and Wagner. He dominated Scottish musical life for over twenty years, and I loved singing with him. Mind you, his conducting technique was unusual, unique, maddening! Once, when struggling to interpret his beat in Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’, I, a callow youth of 28, timidly asked him if he might be a bit clearer in one particular bar, but he yelled over the orchestra pit: “Don’t ….ing watch me, just sing, and I’ll be there for you!” Astonishingly, he was right, and I rarely had a problem thereafter!
The engagement of the Italian mezzo-soprano, Laura Sarti for the role of Geneviève in “Pelléas et Mélisande” was symptomatic of the early years of Scottish Opera, in that nearly all the soloists were foreign. My arrival twenty years later was an indicator of how the company had progressed. In the meantime I had studied with Laura at the Guildhall School of Music in London, as she had moved from singing herself to a starry career as a vocal coach.
In the early years, nearly all the major roles were sung by artists from abroad and England, but part of Gibson’s plan was to have more and more Scots on stage and in leading roles. This was achieved slowly over the years, as more and better singers came through the Royal Scottish Academy of Music in Glasgow (now the Royal Scottish Conservatoire) or returned from England. The two Williams, McCue and McAlpine (Bass and Tenor) became stalwarts of the early days, and by the time I appeared on the scene, many of the lead roles were taken by Scots. The chorus had become fully professional and was almost exclusively Scottish, and very well-trained. Gibson and younger conductors like Roderick Brydon and James Lockhart used the SNO in the pit, and when the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1974, it was used for smaller scale operas. In 1980 the Scottish Opera Orchestra was formed to play exclusively for the Opera, and I feel very honoured to have been engaged at the summit of the company’s success.
Between 1962 and 1982, some of the giant peaks of the operatic repertoire had been climbed, including Wagner’s ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’, Berlioz’ ‘Les Troyens’, Strauss’ ‘Der Rosenkavalier’, Verdi’s ‘Otello’ and Mozart’s ‘Figaro’ and ‘Cosi’. Usually comic operas were played in English, while tragedies were more often in the original. Of course, this was all in the days before surtitles, so opera in languages no-one in the audience understood were difficult to sell. The solution of operas with jokes for the audience to understand being in English, and those operas taking the listener to a higher level of consciousness, and often not translating well, being in the original, worked pretty well, although as a singer I always prefer to sing a role in the language it was composed in. This is where surtitles have immeasurably improved the experience of going to the opera and have immeasurably improved our pleasure in singing it!
Some of the singers who were persuaded to sing at Scottish Opera in these early years were legends – the likes of Janet Baker, Helga Dernesch, Charles Craig, Peter Glossop, David Ward, Inia te Wiata, Kiri te Kanawa, Elizabeth Harwood, Joan Carlisle, Joseph Rouleau, Don Garrard, John Shirley-Quirk, Margaret Marshall, George Shirley, some of the very best singers around. More and more Scottish singers appeared – John Graham, Ronald Morrison, John Robertson, Linda Ormiston, Patricia Hay, Claire Livingstone, Nan Christie, Gordon Christie, John Shiels, Norman White, Alan Watt, Gordon Sandison, Marie Slorach. The list goes on and on, and apologies to anyone else I should have mentioned, but it was an astonishing achievement. Peter Hemmings, who had been involved almost from the start, was instrumental in developing Gibson’s vision of the company, and as Administrator at the age of 32, he was responsible for most of the early triumphs.
Sir Alec was keen to develop new Scottish operas and, along with Hemmings, and a largely supportive board, many new operas were commissioned. That none of them found their way into standard repertoire was not for want of trying or energy. At that time, the main problem was with the then current vogue for atonal music, appealing to some connoisseurs, but unbearable to most audience members. People who found Benjamin Britten’s music distasteful, were not going to fill the theatres for operas far more difficult than anything Britten wrote!
The triumphs were many however, and when I arrived at the age of 26, singing the Sergeant of Archers in Puccini’s ‘Manon Lescaut’, which opened the Edinburgh International Festival in 1982, I was joining a company on the crest of a wave, with a new permanent theatre in the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, a full-time chorus and a full-time orchestra, with company soloists numbering about 10, and a pool of Scottish singers able to cope with most roles in many operas.
The director, John Cox, who had made a name for himself internationally, and especially at Glyndebourne, had recently been appointed as Administrator at Scottish Opera, and indeed it was John who directed that ‘Manon Lescaut’. Many great productions followed, old and new. I sang in Jonathan Miller’s splendid ‘Magic Flute’, a wonderful ‘Meistersinger’ with Norman Bailey as Sachs, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in a fantastic production with James Bowman as Oberon, a beautiful production of Cavalli’s ‘L’Egisto’ and I sang to the largest audience ever seen in Scotland, at the Edinburgh Playhouse in Bizet’s ‘The Pearl Fishers’.
How things went downhill so quickly after I left in 1985 was remarkable and had nothing to do with me. It had everything to do with Sir Alexander Gibson “retiring” in 1986, and with him his vision for the company. I moved on to other things, and so am not privy to what went wrong, and I shall leave that to Hugh Kerr to continue the story. Suffice it to say, that I never sang with Scottish Opera again (my last role was the Speaker in ‘The Magic Flute’ in 1985), a source of continuing sorrow to me, and to the many other Scottish singers who vanished from the company around that time.
I was to return to sing Dikój in ‘Katya Kabanova’ in 2018, but illness prevented me from appearing, and then Covid came along. A back injury has forced me into retirement from opera, so sadly I will never sing with my beloved Scottish Opera again.
