Thea Musgrave’s ‘Mary, Queen of Scots’

In Festen, the recent new opera by Mark Anthony Turnage at Covent Garden, the music exhibited a calm exterior, hiding its emotional depths of stress and anxiety. (See my review here.) At the Coliseum, in a co-production by the ENO and San Francisco Opera, Thea Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots was the converse. Stress and anxiety were on the surface the whole time, making for a rather tiring performance, even though it lasted only about an hour and forty minutes.

This was a Scottish opera created by Scottish composer. Musgrave has lived largely in the United States for the past fifty years, and counting. Her eponymous heroine also lived abroad (in France) for most of her life, so there was a natural affinity between composer and subject. Musgrave focuses on her Scottish years from 1561 to 1568, including her forced abdication in 1567, rather than her later execution by her cousin Elizabeth I of England. That part of Mary’s life has already been the subject of another opera, Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, based on the play by Schiller.

In Musgave’s version Mary is surrounded by three ambitious men: her half brother James Stewart (Earl of Moray and later regent for her son and his half-nephew, James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England); her cousin Lord Darnley who became her second husband (she had previously been married to Francois II of France who died at 16); and her seducer, the Earl of Bothwell, who became her third husband. In the end James Stewart convinces the people of Scotland to demand Mary’s abdication in favour of her baby son, and when her appeals to the people fall on deaf ears, she is tricked into fleeing, alone, to England.

It’s a huge canvas to incorporate in a single opera, but Musgrave manages both music and text (based on a play by Peruvian author Amalia Elguera) — a tribute to her undoubted abilities in creating a taut operatic work. Attractive American soprano Heidi Stober shows brilliantly how Mary tries so hard to exert her authority amidst not only competing ambitions but the religious split between a Catholic queen and a Protestant government.

This opera was first staged in 1977 in Musgrave’s home town of Edinburgh, but this was a new staging with modern costumes, showing the chorus looking like people who had just walked in from a hiking trail. The guns at the end looked like AK47s, which rather spoiled the composer’s carefully thought out presentation of key events in 16th century Scotland. For anyone unfamiliar with the history of the time, this was a sympathetic presentation, leaving us with no doubt about the forces, both popular and personal, with which Mary had to contend.

The performances were excellent. Heidi Stober was superb as Mary, who is gloriously insensitive to advice (“I will do what I please”) and rejects serious concerns from her courtiers (“You can’t keep the peace with music and dancing”). Fine performances by Alex Otterburn (James Stewart), John Findon (Earl of Bothwell), Rupert Charlesworth (Lord Darnley) and Barnaby Rea (Darnley’s friend David Riccio) and Darren Jeffery (Cardinal Beaton) under the baton of Joana Carneiro. The staging by Stewart Laing showed a marquee being assembled, representing the improvisation and impermanence of Mary’s reign.

Altogether an interesting presentation of Scotland at the time of the English Tudors, with permanent musical tension, but lacking period costumes that might have allowed us to distance ourselves from a worthy history lesson.

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