“Historical Anthology of Music by Women”
Scottish composer and conductor Thea Musgrave was born in Barnton, Midlothian. After graduation from Edinburgh University, she studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, from 1950 to 1954. Many of her early works were composed on commission and were of an expanded diatonic idiom. These include Suite o’Bairn-sangs, written for the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the chamber opera The Abbot of Drimock.
After her return from Paris, Musgrave’s style turned toward chromaticism and abstraction in form, as seen in her Piano Sonata and String Quartet. By the end of the 1950s, Musgrave had adopted serialism, and she had come to represent fully the mainstream of British composition in that regard and in her disavowal of the experimental avant-garde.
Her opera The Decision was staged by the New Opera Company in 1967. According to The New Grove, this work “forced an extroversion which her earlier works generally lacked, and the benefit is apparent in most of Musgrave’s subsequent work.” The 1960s saw a spate of commissions for major works, such as the Clarinet Concerto, for the Royal Philharmonic Society, and the Viola Concerto, for the BBC, first performed by her husband, Peter Mark. Musgrave has explained her concept of “dramatic-abstract” procedures in certain innovative instrumental compositions of the 1960s as “dramatic in presentation and abstract because of the absence of a program.” One such work is From One to Another, which uses a prerecorded tape in conjunction with a solo viola.
Thea Musgrave is now a resident of the United States. Increasingly active as a conductor of her own works, she conducted her opera Mary; Queen of Scots at its premiere in August 1977 at the Edinburgh International Festival and again in 1979 with the Spring Opera Theater in San Francisco. Mary, Queen of Scots was first performed in the United States by the Virginia Opera Association, and it has had subsequent performances in New York, Chicago, London, and Stuttgart.
In his review for The Spectator concerning the Edinburgh premiere, Rodney Milnes stated:
Against all 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. . . . This is a twentieth-century grand opera, and it works.
Andrew Porter in The New Yorker added his accolades following the United States premiere:
I found myself forgetting 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 the melodic lines, calmed or excited by the shifting patterns of harmonic tension, and stirred by the colors of the score. There is a visionary quality in Mary.
As with Wagner’s operas, the remarkable dramatic force of Mary, Queen of Scots derives largely from a single authorship of both music and libretto. Musgrave based the latter on the play Moray by Emilia Elguera:
Writing my own libretto has given me a heightened sensitivity to the perennial question of balance between musical and dramatic elements in opera: I wanted my opera to have vitality and depth; and I needed to find the right delicate balance between them. To achieve this I worked in the following way. After making the initial outline and sketching out a complete draft, I decided to leave detailed working out until I came to write the music. Thus the libretto could reflect the demands made by the music and vice versa. . . . In fact I was rewriting the libretto right up to the day the opera was finished.
Mary Stuart (1542-1587) was aptly called by her cousin Elizabeth I “the daughter of debate.” The rightful heir to the throne of Scotland, Mary grew up in France and married the boy king Francois II. She returned to Scotland at age nineteen, already a widow. As a Roman Catholic she was unwelcome to many, Scotland having been led toward Protestantism by the forceful preacher John Knox. She first married the widely hated Lord Darnley and, following his murder, her cousin Henry Stuart. The Scottish nobles imprisoned Mary, but she escaped to England. There, however, Elizabeth feared her as second in line to the throne, placed her in confinement for eighteen years, and finally had her executed. In the composer’s words,
The whole work revolves around Mary, her personality expressed through the situations in which she finds herself. There is her marriage to Darnley, which goes wrong so soon; her stormy relationship with Bothwell; and all the confrontations with her brother James, each vying to gain . . . ultimate power and control. It is a struggle to the death. Mary is a tragic figure yet vitally alive.
The excerpt given here represents Mary at her most determined moment, when she vows to rely on her own inner resources and to reign without the aid of her presumed allies, who have deceived her at every turn.
Recording
Mary, Queen of Scots. Virginia Opera Association, Peter Mark, conductor. Moss Music Group, 1979.
Further Reading
Walsh, S. “Thea Musgrave,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Monologue of Mary, from Act III of Mary, Queen of Scots
Reprinted from the vocal score by permission of Novello and Company Limited.
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