The ill-fated Queen of Scots has always exerted a powerful fascination: she has appeared on stage, film and television and in countless novels and biographies. Donizetti's opera offers a great singing-actress untold opportunities. Mary portrays a memorable range of human emotion in the scenes leading to her execution - optimism, regret, love, remorse, despair and in the climactic scene of the fictitious encounter with her persecutor, Elizabeth I, the royal pride and defiance that are her undoing.

Dame Janet Baker's portrayal, one of the pinnacles of her career, is now preserved for posterity.