Opera Scotland

Comte Ory 1954Glyndebourne Opera

Read more about the opera Count Ory

The 1954 Edinburgh Festival saw a seventh visit by Glyndebourne Opera. The complete novelty was by Rossini - Le Comte Ory. The staging of Ariadne auf Naxos was not quite a novelty - the 1950 Glyndebourne Ariadne had offered the fascinating original 1912 version, with the abbreviated Molière play Le bourgeois gentilhomme. 1954 now saw the more conventional format, complete with Prologue. A work which was now a popular favourite, Mozart's Così fan tutte, was making its third appearance.

Count Ory is arguably among the best of Rossini's operas, and a wonderful comic piece. How astonishing then, that not only were these the first performances in Scotland, but it has hardly been seen since. The Glyndebourne staging was revived in Sussex repeatedly in the fifties, and Anthony Besch's 1963 staging for Sadler's Wells was seen many times at the Coliseum, though it only toured to Scotland once. Scottish Opera did schedule the work for small-scale touring, but nothing beyond that was done. With luck the recent stagings at Covent Garden and the Met may encourage a further look at it elsewhere.

Cast details are from a copy of the programme in the OperaScotland collection.