The final new production of English National Opera’s season is Thea Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots, directed by Stewart Laing and conducted by Joana Carneiro. It was last heard in London at Sadler’s Wells during a 1980 tour by Scottish Opera, who premiered it in Edinburgh in 1977.
It’s a bleak, uncompromising piece, in many ways. Musgrave is having none of the still prevalent Romantic view of Mary as the passionate martyr of Fotheringhay, focusing instead on her years in Scotland between 1561 and her abdication in 1567, and probing her relationships with the three men who jostled to control her: her illegitimate half-brother James, a fierce Protestant, whose fixation with his sister, it is implied, may have been incestuous; Henry Darnley, her profligate second husband; and Bothwell, the Catholic mercenary, whose ostensible loyalty masks a tendency to coercion and sexual violence.
