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Scott, Opera and the Italian Journey

Earlier this year I was invited by Abbotsford, together with the Italian and Japanese Consuls in Scotland, to give a twenty minute opening address as part of a musical evening at Abbotsford, in which singers from the Royal College of Music and Drama gave a programme of songs from Scott-based operas, focusing on Lucia de Lammermoor and The Lady of the Lake. I accepted on the basis that I could briefly do three things: firstly, assert the modern relevance of Scott; secondly, speak all too briefly regarding Lucia and The Lady of the Lake, and lastly, and I thought, appropriately for our hosts, I could give a short account of Scott's Italian journey of 1831, that last few months of vivid experience just before his death at Abbotsford. I do not think readers of The Bottle Imp need to be reminded of Scott's modern relevance, so what follows is the second and third part of that presentation.

Scott and Opera

What was it about Scott's poems and novels that attracted composers all over Europe—and inspired more than seventy operas? (More than forty of them are Italian.) We have four on Rob Roy, four on The Heart of Midlothian, eight on The Bride of Lammermuir, and no less than eleven each on Ivanhoe and Kenilworth. An easy answer might point to the suffering heroines of so many of these, and their attraction through dramatic song (such as Lucia's famous 'mad scene') for demonstrating the technical skills of a prima donna. But is it not also to do with what I discussed as Scott's romantic innovations in his work, in landscape, in symbolism, and in the way the old supernatural traditions of Europe and Scotland are combined with psychological tensions arising from dramatic historical change, which astonished the world and influenced nations as well as composers?

But of course composers and librettists made substantial—sometimes crucial—changes in their adaptations of Scott's originals. I restrict myself here to a very brief and personal response to the major changes made by Rossini and Donizetti in adapting The Lady of the Lake and The Bride of Lammermuir.

Rossini, it seems to me, casts his opera's atmosphere in terms of Ossian rather than Scott—'the sons of Fingal' are at war for a vague Fatherland. And certainly in the version I have seen Roderick Dhu is more like Finn MacCoull than a Highland chief. No harm in this; opera exploits Scott for potential set scenes and choric magnificence, just as modern Shakespeare productions change the author's historic settings and implications. Donizetti's version of Lucia seems to me stronger, more appropriately adapted—despite losing Scott's Lady Macbeth, the tyrannous and duplicitous Lady Ashton, and suggesting that her replacement is Lucia's Stepmother, and that she is already sad in grieving for her own dead mother. It's true that Scott's story is drastically altered, with the range of Scott's dramatis personae severely restricted.

Yet what Donizetti manages, I believe, is to take the core of Scott's ballad-like tale of thwarted passion. Yes, the detail of politics and Lord Ashton's duplicities and manipulations disappears, as does Caleb Balderstone, the utterly loyal, grotesquely comic remaining servant of the Master of Ravenswood, along with other sinister dramatis personae, like the evil Jacobite Craigengelt. The intensity of Scott's blind blind seer Alice, who foretells the tragedy, is diluted. In setting, the castle of Wolf's Crag, ghastly above the German Ocean, drawn from Fast Castle in Berwickshire, fades also, but the cursed fountain, central to Scott's action, is maintained, binding the two lovers in their destiny. If I have a real regret, it's that Lady Ashton, Scott's Lady Macbeth in her scheming and ruthless ambition, is omitted altogether—but presumably the sheer power needed in song to present her would have taken away from the different power of Lucia's grief and madness.

But opera is opera and Scott is Scott; their genres are utterly different, and we should simply be grateful that Scott's work acted as stimulus and platform for very different realisations.

The Italian Journey of 1831–32

Scott rarely left Britain. Indeed, apart from the 1815 celebratory trip to Paris and the field of Waterloo, Dublin in 1825 to meet Maria Edgeworth, and visits to London, he travelled mainly in Scotland and the north of England. It's surely all the more revealing of his feeling for Italy that he decided in 1831, for his health's sake—and before it was too late?—to start a European tour by sailing to Malta and then Naples.

It tells us of his huge British and international standing that a Royal Navy frigate was put at his and his family's disposal. His son Charles worked in Naples for The Foreign Office; several expatriates, notably Sir William Gell, whose Reminiscences of Scott's visit are a crucial record of the visit, joined in his enthusiastic reception by distinguished Italians ranging from the King of Naples to the Archbishop of Toranto (Scott's pigeon French only matched by Royal and Ecclesiastical Italian English!). [...]

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