Scottish Opera was willed into being by one man’s refusal to accept that his country couldn’t have it. Alexander Gibson — the dynamic young Scot conducting the Scottish National Orchestra — founded the company in 1962 with a first Glasgow season at the King’s Theatre of just two operas, Madama Butterfly and Pelléas et Mélisande, played by his orchestra and sung with an ambition wildly out of proportion to the budget. The gamble was that Scotland would turn out for opera done seriously; Scotland did.
The company’s first decade is one of British music’s great ascents: full seasons within years, a professional chorus, international soloists learning the Glasgow habit — and, as the summit, Wagner’s complete Ring cycle in 1971, mounted by a nine-year-old company to national astonishment and reviews that stopped patronising Scottish opera forever. Gibson’s Ring did for the company what the QE2 had done for the yards: proved the local product world-class.
In 1974 the company bought the Theatre Royal in Hope Street and, restored, reopened it in 1975 as its permanent home — Scotland’s first national opera house, the Victorian auditorium of the Theatre History page filled at last with its intended scale of sound, and shared from then on with Scottish Ballet. Glasgow, which had imported its opera for two centuries, became the place the nation’s opera was made.
The mission was always national, and the company’s vans have criss-crossed Scotland for sixty years: full productions to Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness, and the celebrated small-scale tours — Opera Highlights in village halls, island runs where the orchestra is a piano and the venue holds eighty — plus a pioneering education programme that has put opera in front of generations of schoolchildren. The belief that a national company means all of the nation has survived every budget.
The budgets tested it: the 2000s brought a genuine crisis, with the full-time chorus lost and seasons cut in a restructuring that wounded the company and the art form’s advocates alike — wounds honestly recorded here, and slowly grown back since through co-productions, festival work and a stabilised repertoire. Sixty years on from two operas at the King’s, Gibson’s implausible company remains what he built: Scotland’s biggest performing-arts organisation, headquartered in Glasgow, singing.