Opera Scotland

Madam Butterfly 1978Scottish Opera

Read more about the opera Madama Butterfly

Scottish Opera's third winter season at the Theatre Royal (1977-78) opened with Thea Musgrave's Mary, Queen of Scots, premiered a few weeks earlier at the Edinburgh Festival. It was followed by Fidelio, Otello, Ariadne on Naxos, The Golden Cockerel, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Falstaff, The Marriage of Figaro (launched earlier in the year), Madama Butterfly and The Bartered Bride - this last being the only completely new production.

The effective 1965 Peter Ebert staging of Butterfly, in David Wilby's stylish designs, was here seen in a second, and last, run in a Theatre Royal subscription season (though it would come back briefly to mark the opening of the Edinburgh Playhouse in 1980). The company did it proud, with Gibson and Ebert back in charge.

Malcolm Donnelly took on another major part. Most notable was the British debut of the excellent young tenor from New York, Neil Shicoff. He was an ideally debonair Pinkerton, and would quickly revisit the company as a superb Duke of Mantua, by which time his international career was well under way.