Tim Cornwell: Celebrate Sir Walter’s role in Scottish opera

He has taken a certain amount of withering flack from the purists, but rightly won a publication deal.

Now comes a welcome reminder of the role that Scott played in making opera Scottish. Husband and wife team Douglas Lowndes and Sue Bennett, with their London production company In Time Pictures, are hoping to stir a year-long celebration of Scott’s contribution to opera, timed for the anniversary of Waverley’s publication in 1814.

They claim some progress already. The Royal Opera House, at Covent Garden, has apparently pledged itself to a live broadcast of its production of La Donna del Lago by satellite to cinemas in May 2013. The Rossini opera, based on Scott’s Lady of the Lake, itself premiered in Naples on 24 October, 1819.

The couple are hoping that as many Scottish cinemas as possible will carry it, but with experience in making art documentaries, they also have more ambitious ideas in mind.

Sir Walter Scott’s influence came as a huge 19th century celebrity author celebrated amid the flowering of Italian opera. For an art form that the Welsh have more proudly embraced as their own, Scott’s given us plenty in the arsenal of opera classics.

Best-known is Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the adapted version of Scott’s love story, The Bride of Lammermoor, which opened in Naples in 1835. Scottish Opera last staged it in 2007 (Opera Bohemia, a start-up small Scottish company, have been performing it this Easter, after a run at last year’s Fringe).

Then there’s Bellini’s I Puritani, The Puritans, from a French play Roundheads and Cavaliers, itself an adaption of Scott’s Old Mortality. It was a favourite opera of Queen Victoria, herself no slouch as a Scott fan (Bride of Lammermoor was the first novel she read).

With Bizet’s 1865 Jolie Fille du Perth, Arthur Sullivan’s Ivanhoe, and even ties to Wagner’s Mastersingers of Nuremburg, more than 50 operas are claimed as Scott adaptations or inspirations, for an author who was the toast of the nineteenth century.

Opera in Scotland still suffers from the elitist label. It was not so long ago that a Labour culture minister, Frank McAveety, was heard to say that the only Barber of Seville he knew was the one he’d met at a Uefa Cup final.

Scottish Opera has done its bit to challenge that. It’s tried to make opera relevant and up to date by enlisting contemporary Scottish writers and composers to write new, shorter operas, for small venues.

That has been seen in its Five:15 programme, and in this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, where the company is in the King’s Theatre and the Traverse doing one-hour operas newly composed by Craig Armstrong and others.

Scottish talents like David McVicar – director of this month’s thoroughly successful The Rake’s Progress – have also helped. The company also quietly let slip recently that it will stage Gilbert & Sullivan favourite The Pirates of Penzance in 2012/13, in a co-production with a revived D’Oyly Carte Opera Company.

Financially, is it elitist? Yes, and no. The best ticket in the house is currently £67.50, while under-25s can get in for £10. Go to see South Pacific at the commercial Edinburgh Playhouse Theatre this week – no-one’s talking elitist here – and you’re still looking at £42.50 a pop in a much larger space. Opera lovers will argue out the price matches for major sporting events.

But there’s no gainsaying – at least according to the likes of Scottish conductor Donald Runnicles – that where in Germany or Italy, opera is part of life, it’s here easily seen as the preserve of the Morningside crowd.

The willingness to fund opera to a scale anything like its European or American counterparts has surely suffered as a result.

Let’s not get too parochial. But a few more stomping productions of Scott’s operas – or others from Verdi’s Macbeth to The Flying Dutchman, a Wagnerian story originally intended for a Hebridean setting – would be welcome reminders that opera is more Scottish than we sometimes think.