Opera Scotland

Madam Butterfly 1976Scottish Opera

Read more about the opera Madama Butterfly

Scottish Opera's first subscription season at the restored Theatre Royal (1975-76) contained ten operas in total, played in sequence. The gala Fledermaus was followed by short runs of Otello, Hermiston, Ariadne on Naxos, Così fan tutte, The Golden Cockerel, Die Fledermaus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Don Giovanni, Madama Butterfly and Falstaff. The Otello had been seen regularly since 1963, the Falstaff only once before, in 1966. Fledermaus had been launched during the summer while Hermiston had been premiered at the recent Edinburgh Festival - both were previously unseen in Glasgow. The only productions that were brand new were Ariadne and Rimsky-Korsakov's Golden Cockerel, unseen in Scotland for half a century, and only occasionally since then at Covent Garden. It proved to be an exotic delight.

The first appearance of Peter Ebert's successful ten-year-old Butterfly staging at the Theatre Royal gave new roles to David Hillman, Joanna Bruno and Graham Clark. It was always a piece Gibson conducted gloriously, from his time working with Joan Hammond at Sadler's Wells and on tour in the fifties - and he introduced three different productions during his Scottish Opera years.