Mary, Queen of Scots (1977)

★★★★ Musgrave’s lyrical libretto sits well, set off by her spiky, harmonically pungent, and entirely unsentimental musical language. Act III finds Mary, ever the self-aware pragmatist, desperate to find a solution to her political impasse. Caught between her ineffectual drunken husband Darnley, her ambitious brother James, and the equally ambitious Bothwell, Mary miscalculates to disastrous effect leading to a series of charged one-on-one encounters. - (Opera Dell'arte opera scenes; Extract Act 3 with piano only)

With its evocative, atmospheric orchestrations, Musgrave’s thrilling score is rooted in the rough-hewn, elemental Scotland of Elizabethan times.

Fast-moving, gripping ... radiant melodies ... vibrant set pieces ... a compelling plot ...

... drama on a grand scale ... crammed with power, treachery, passion and murder from start to finish ... Musgrave puts this considerable drama under a musical magnifying glass: her word-setting amplifies all the intensity and the voices shine out against a deftly details orchestral background that is strong yet transparent, responsive to the ongoing torrent of conflicting emotions.

The score's fierce energy crackles with conflict while offering moments of musical titillation by the deployment of well-integrated Scottish consort and dance music.

Whenever I have been bowled over, carried away, by a Musgrave composition – as I was by Mary, Queen of Scots – it has nearly always been at second and subsequent hearings, once first-encounter admiration of her sheer competence, her effortless matching of means to ends and of demands to the executants for whom she wrote, has been registered and can be taken for granted. A first hearing of Mary was enough to make it apparent how profitably Musgrave has pondered the problems of writing contemporary opera and found her solutions to them… At a second hearing, I found myself forgetting about the careful planning, the parallels, the influences and instead caring very much about Mary herself – move by move, event by event – and being at the same time rapt in the music, intent on the movement of melodic lines, calmed or excited by the shifting patterns of harmonic tensions, and stirred by the colours of the score. There is a visionary quality in Mary.

This is Thea Musgrave's fourth opera and by far her most successful; indeed her complete mastery of the operatic medium and the skill with which she marshals the whole complex apparatus with which an opera composer is confronted, mark her out as one of the most successful composers for the lyric theatre today. Rarely since Peter Grimes have I been as impressed by the first hearing of a contemporary stage work. Thea Musgrave has that rare gift of being able to create characters who are musically as well as dramatically viable; to create and maintain dramatic tension; and to write music that is at once original and at the same time easily accessible.

The bull's-eye is Scottish Opera's Mary, Queen of Scots...Against all known odds it has a better chance of becoming established in the repertory than any new work seen here in the last ten years...Musgrave's musical language, vaguely post-Britten, eschews the angular declamation that has been so depressing a characteristic of contemporary opera. Her writing for voice is as satisfying to listen to as it must be to sing...this a twentieth century grand opera, and it works.

There is more theatrical red blood in this Mary than in most of the new operas that reach the contemporary stage. Miss Musgrave is a lively, inventive, accomplished composer, who has shown dramatic gifts not only in three earlier operas, but in a whole sequence of concert works that are mainly cast in quasi-dramatic form. The composer...has written the libretto herself; and an admirable text it is, clear and straightforward in language, well moulded for the stage, and full of musical possibilities that should strike us as we read it in advance...All in all it was a gripping and inspiring occasion.