Luigi Ferrari has transformed Wexford Festival Opera. But can even he fend off world trends, asks Michael Dervan

Before he became its artistic director, in 1995, Luigi Ferrari knew very little about Wexford Festival Opera. He knew it featured rare works. He knew Elaine Padmore had the job he now has. He knew the festival - whose 2003 season begins on Thursday - had led a friend to include Wexford in a book on the music capitals of Europe. But he attended his first Wexford festival only after his appointment, so Padmore's final festival was the first he experienced.

Ferrari's reforms reached far. "The point of the festival in those days was not what you could do but what you couldn't." Rehearsals lasted only three weeks. Now they last four and a half. The orchestra pit was so small that many works couldn't be attempted even with reduced orchestrations. Ferrari had it enlarged. The chorus, a mix of local volunteers and imported professionals, was variable and often too small. Ferrari built a fully professional 40-member chorus around the 25 singers of a choir from Prague.

And he colonised the popular end of the repertoire by introducing the condensed, 90-minute, original-language, piano-accompanied performances of the Opera Scenes series, which this year features Humperdinck's Hänsel Und Gretel, Offenbach's Les Contes D'Hoffmann and Donizetti's L'Elisir D'Amore. These performances replaced Padmore's pot-pourri programmes.

He also decided to avoid the baroque repertoire, with all the complications of needing a specialised orchestra, and quickly ditched chamber-music recitals in favour of vocal and choral events.

The festival, he points out, is a finely balanced operation, with singers from the chorus taking roles in the Opera Scenes and Prague Chamber Choir giving independent choral concerts, so that financial and artistic decisions are linked in a complex web.

Next year will be his final festival, and he can foresee that if his successor wants changes "they may have to redesign the festival in toto. Everything is interconnected for a technical reason or for a financial reason, and the final result has to be decided by artistic input and by a selection which is not imagined by a bureaucrat or a financial director."

The festival is also affected by developments in the wider world of opera, where works that would once have been considered core Wexford material now turn up in the schedules of many companies. "Many opera houses now have one title each season which is unknown or rare, and this affects the uniqueness of a place like Wexford," he says.

Wexford benefits from being a festival, of course, with a multiplicity of daily offerings. But its approach to repertoire is having to change. "One of the formulae of the festival here," explains Ferrari, "was to have less-known operas by well-known composers. I think that we are quite at the end of that story now, because there are no longer less-known operas by well-known composers which are not performed elsewhere in the world. We'll try to do that next year for one more time, but this will be my last drop.

"What is happening is perhaps that, with new dimensions of the repertoire opening elsewhere, it's easier now for Wexford to consider titles that were once thought too rare even for us."

Last year, when this year's main operas were announced - Weber and Mahler's Die Drei Pintos, Granados's María Del Carmen and Weinberger's Svanda Dudák - some Wexford regulars implied that they could prove a watershed in audience tolerance.

Ferrari is happy to contradict them. "Our audience is now prepared to listen to titles that 10 years ago I couldn't propose to my board. The proof is that we continue to have full houses, despite the fact that this year's trio is enormously less popular than the trio I proposed in my first festival, in 1995 - Pacini's Saffo, Rimsky-Korsakov's Mayskaya Noch and Mascagni's Iris."

Delving even deeper into the pile of forgotten operas is not going to give rise to quality issues, he says. He still has a lot of interesting titles on his own shortlist, and as audience taste changes new areas of repertoire will always become viable.

New opera by living composers, not an issue for Wexford, is a major stumbling block around the world. The limitations of orchestral repertoire are as nothing compared with the limitations of operatic repertoire. "This is a very serious point. I've been attacked by critics in the United Kingdom about the fact that I declared, not in an arrogant way, my feeling that the history of the opera, as far as the opera is concerned - strictly the opera, not the musical theatre - ended in the 1950s. That doesn't mean that our job is finished, that opera is finished; obviously not. Musical theatre has to restart itself - and probably has actually started to restart. We are listening and experiencing now something which is not opera but is certainly musical theatre and certainly has a future. It's a time of transition. I'm absolutely optimistic about that."

He is, however, concerned that through "the enormous repertoire we have in store" the producers of opera somehow have to find "an audience which is called to the theatre by a contemporary need or a contemporary proposal. We have a historical lot of things to present them, but there is no link between them, their life, their interests, their experiences and what we have".

He talks of his work as director of the Rossini Opera Festival, in Italy, where the challenge was to "reconnect the link between a repertoire abandoned for 150 years and an audience unaware of the codes of those operas - not the musical codes but the stage code, the production code".

He says: "How can you perform a Rossini opera? How can you reconnect the link between the taste of an audience with no idea about what to enjoy in a bel canto opera and what there actually is to enjoy about it? You had to make new audiences rediscover the reason to take pleasure in that repertoire.

"That was what the festival achieved. It was mainly a problem of working on historical repertoire and considering that repertoire as if it was contemporary."

He recalls Claudio Abbado working on Il Viaggio A Reims as if it were a contemporary score by Luigi Nono - and speaks from the experience of having worked with Nono on his Prometeo. The freedoms taken with Il Viaggio A Reims not only helped to restore it to the repertoire but also, he says, came to be the standard solutions in approaching the piece.

Ferrari sounds generally optimistic about the state of opera, particularly about the state of singing. He laments the lack of Verdi singers in Italy but feels that a positive aspect of the internationalisation of opera is that Verdi singers can now surface anywhere in the world. "We are wealthy as never before. The globalisation gives us so many different fruits from so many different areas, so many different markets."

But the dominance of directors is a matter for concern. Broadly speaking, opera has over a long period moved from the age of the singer via the age of the conductor to the age of the director. People now often identify performances by the name of the director - Peter Sellars's Nozze Di Figaro, Jonathan Miller's Rigoletto, Patrice Chéreau's Ring - rather than by that of the conductor or any member of the cast.

"I hope that a change will happen," he says. "This story has to be rebalanced." He's particularly concerned about stage directors becoming administrative directors of theatres, engaging in reciprocal work invitations, sharing power and ultimately restricting, as it were, the code or the language of what's seen on stage.

He likens it to what happened in contemporary music in the 1950s and 1960s, when "there was a very strong school, German school, and everyone who wanted to be admitted at an international level of perception had to go through the door of that school. If you didn't go to Darmstadt you were absolutely nobody, and so on. That created a closed group. That's probably the danger that's in the air right now".

He worries about the self-referentiality of the situation. He also worries about the use of amplification, likening it in a long digression to widening the gap between the goalposts in football just to facilitate the scoring of goals. He muses about matches in which 30 goals might be scored, and his expressions show how pointless he thinks it would be.

With just one more festival for him to work on, I ask which productions have given him most pleasure in his time at Wexford. The answers are quick and precise. Mayskaya Noch, "because we discovered that fantastic conductor Vladimir Jurowski". Fibich's Sarka, "because it's a fantastic score". I Cavalieri Di Ekebù: "I know that Zandonai is considered by some people a third-rate composer, but I consider him a first-rate composer".

And, last year, Martinu's Mirandolina, a rare Wexford foray into the second half of the 20th century, was "a great production, a real challenge", he says. "I was so pleased that when I asked the wife of a sponsor, who's not an opera buff, what she liked best she said, 'I have to say Mirandolina,' knowing that she was expected to give another answer. This proved that there is no difficult musical language which cannot be understood by the audience of today."

Wexford Festival Opera opens on Thursday and runs until November 3rd. Details from 053-22144, www.wexfordopera.com