Trojan triumphs

Trojan triumphs

Opera, it is said, frowns on Scotland in the same way as Scotland frowns on opera. As fine new opera houses are opened on prime sites in Scandinavia, and the Scottish government continues to shrug its shoulders at such  achievements elsewhere, it’s easy to believe that there is truth in this local history of operatic  incompatibility. 

Yet Scotland’s operatic tradition is in fact an impressive one. It was here, a century ago, that the Denhof Opera Company mounted pioneering performances of Wagner’s Ring. and it was here in the nineteen-thirties that Mozart’s Idomeneo and Berlioz’s The Trojans received their British premieres from the Glasgow Grand Opera Society.  

Glasgow’s operatic history has been long and fascoinating, ranging from Jenny Lind’s famous appearance in Bellini’s  La Sonnambula and Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment in 1848 to the arrival of Sir Thomas Beecham and his opera company with such exotic splendours as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel in the early twentieth century. 

All this made it easy for Scottish Opera to plant its roots in Glasgow with Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande in 1962 and develop quickly into a great national asset, staging a sensational Berlioz centenary production of The Trojans in 1969. This year, at the Edinburgh Festival, The Trojans will be back, though it won’t be Scottish Opera - whose idea of progress nowadays seems to be the touring  of small-scale piano-accompanied productions round Scottish villages and being patted on the back for doing so - that is performing it. 

But the Mariinsky Theatre’s production, like Scottish Opera’s in 1969, will rightly present the work complete  in all its grandeur on a single evening, unlike the later Scottish Opera production which made the mistake of  spreading the work across  two nights. Berlioz’s opera demands no-holds-barred presentation, and Scottish Opera in 1969 even included the dances, as the Mariinsmky will surely also do. 

Conducted three nights running by Valery Gergiev as the climax of this year’s Festival is just what it deserves, making up for the parsimonious treatment - with the music cut to shreds - which Berlioz’s masterpiece  has so often received in its native France.

28 June 2014