In 1896 the National Theatre in Prague announced a Czech opera competition. The work that actually won the competition, Karel Kovarovic's The Dogheads, is today the least well known.
The best-known of the three competition operas is Zdenek Fibich's Sarka, which was seen at the Wexford Festival in 1996 in a production that also brought the festival début of conductor David Agler, who takes over as artistic director from Luigi Ferrari at the end of this year's festival.
Having given Sarka an outing in the early years of his reign in Wexford, Ferrari chose the third-placed opera, Josef Bohuslav Foerster's Eva, for his final Wexford visit to the Czech repertoire, an area which he has favoured above all others, save the Italian.
Eva is the best-known of Foerster's six operas, although, in spite of a production at the Vienna Volksoper in 1915, its place on the operatic stage has largely been confined to the composer's native land.
The opera was based on a play by Gabriela Preissová, the writer who would later inspire Janácek's best-known opera, Jenufa.
But Foerster was no Janácek, either in the way he turned Preissová's text into verse for a libretto (Janácek was happy to take it as it was), or in the detail of his musical responses to the words and situations of that libretto.
The story is one of misaligned love, the seamstress of the title vacillating between two men, unable to bear the shame of living with one while married to the other, and failing to counter the destructive machinations of her lover Mánek's interfering mother.
Paul Curran's production, with handsome symbolic sets by Paul Edwards, moves the action on a couple of decades, and concentrates on a stark representation of Eva's cruel buffeting.
Eva, firmly and sensitively sung by the Czech soprano Iveta Jiríková, shifts sharply enough from one man to the other and back again, as well as into the region of black grief for a lost child, that, in Foerster's hands, the extremity of her see-sawing actually limits the sympathy she can generate.
The ardency of Ukrainian tenor Konstyantyn Andreyev as the ultimately spineless Mánek made him more persuasive than the darker presence of Russian baritone Igor Tarasov as the limp-afflicted Samko.
Slovakian mezzo soprano Denisa Hamarova seemed altogether too youthful as Mánek's manipulative mother Mesjanovka, but US mezzo soprano Elizabeth Batton found a welcome balance as the maid Zuzka, and Irish baritone Roland Davitt made an effective intrusion as the drunken labourer Rubac, the man whose hurtful commentary finally drives Eva over the edge.
Conductor Jaroslav Kyzlink didn't manage to solve the work's problems of pacing, allowing the tension to fluctuate so that the musical and dramatic interest seemed too unevenly dispersed. - Michael Dervan
Wexford Festival Opera continues until Sunday, October 31st (053-22144).
Prinzessin Brambilla, Wexford Festival Opera
Walter Braunfels (1882-1954) is one of those German composers who was ousted from his country's musical life by the Nazis, and whose music did not manage to regain public appreciation in the decades immediately after the second World War.
In the 1920s he had been a leading figure, whose operatic works yielded in popularity only to those of Richard Strauss and Franz Schreker. In his heyday, his music had been conducted by the likes of Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, and Hans Knappertsbusch. But after his death it was not until the 1990s that serious interest was once again paid to his work.
His name is now most closely associated with the opera Die Vögel, based on Aristophanes's The Birds, which appeared on CD in Decca's survey of Entartete Musik, which brought back into circulation a wide range of music that had been dubbed degenerate by the Nazis.
For the last of this year's Wexford Festival operas, outgoing artistic director Luigi Ferrari chose Braunfels's first opera, Prinzessin Brambilla, for his last exploration of German repertoire.
The story of Princess Brambilla comes from a commedia dell'arte tale by Eta Hoffmann. It's not so much a tale of love as a tale of longing that hasn't quite coalesced into love. The manipulation of disguise and identity that is required to establish clarity of vision is rather complicated.
But when all is clear, true love triumphs in the end.
Braunfels's fantastical work was written in 1908 and revised in the late 1920s. There's a clear debt to Richard Strauss, though you'd have to call it a debt at a distance, and the music is in that style of tonal and orchestral profligacy that would have made it seem stylistically advanced when it was new, even if it is, in fact, very far removed from what would now be regarded as cutting edge in the first decade of the 20th century.
The Wexford production by Rosetta Cucchi is a lively affair, all-embracing in manner (it even incorporates what seems to be a reference to the Dance of the Seven Veils from Strauss's Salome), and the designs by Maria Rosaria Tartaglia are of a colour and vibrancy to match.
The weak spots in the casting are the lovers that are to be united.
Italian soprano Elena Lo Forte presents Giazinta as a woman thoroughly dulled by depression, and Canadian tenor Eric Shaw is at times vocally underpowered and also a bit wooden in manner.
Elsewhere things are more even, with Italian baritone Enrico Marabelli in masterly form as the string-pulling Pantalone, and Russian mezzo soprano Ekaterina Gubanova momentarily stealing the show (and also the audience's hearts, to judge by the applause at the end) as his abandoned wife, Barbara.
Daniele Belardinelli stirs up a stormy froth from the members of the Cracow Philharmonic, whose playing, understandably, showed rather more signs of strain in this work than elsewhere during the festival. The chorus was in fine form, the over-projection which has become such a feature of their work sounding fully in place on this particular occasion.
There some moments where Braunfels rather gets himself into a rut, mostly in the second half of the work. But there's a liveliness and a sense of direction here that's not to be found in either of the other main productions at this year's festival.
The operas announced for next year's Wexford Festival, the first under the artistic direction of David Agler, are Maria di Rohan by Donizetti, Pénélope by Fauré, and Susannah by the living American composer Carlisle Floyd, coming to Wexford just 50 years after its première in Talahassee in 1955. - Michael Dervan
Opera Scenes, Wexford Festival Opera
Leoncavallo - Pagliacci
Back in 1995, when Luigi Ferrari transformed the Wexford Festival's long-standing Operatic Scenes (a selection of piano-accompanied scenes from a number of different operas) into the Opera Scenes (condensed, original-language, chorus-less productions of mainstream operas, again piano-accompanied), he originally described his new venture as "mini-operas".
And he also expressed the aspiration that, in future years, he would like to develop them, "perhaps with small orchestra, something like that".
The operatic scenes, originally done in the round, with a minimum of stage apparatus, had gradually acquired settings and costumes.
And the Opera Scenes seemed a natural development, with directors relishing the opportunities in The Barn at White's Hotel for having characters enter through the audience or exploit the venue's narrow balconies.
With White's Hotel now a hole in the ground due to redevelopment, the Opera Scenes moved to the Dun Mhuire Theatre, effectively completing a transformation from black-box experimentalism, to straightforward theatrical presentation, with an audience in a shoebox shaped theatre, all facing the stage.
There's a strange paradox to Wexford's Opera Scenes. It was one of the festival's founders, Dr Tom Walsh, who as a member of the Arts Council in the 1980s, argued against the funding of piano-accompanied opera.
And the major provider of that style of presentation, Irish National Opera, was defunded and replaced in the council's affections by the Opera Theatre Company, which actually operates on the model that Ferrari aspired to back in 1995, though in an altogether different and wider repertoire.
These reflections were prompted by this year's Opera Scenes production of Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, directed by Jacopo Spirei, with sets by Cristiana Aureggi, costumes by Kit Bjorn Petersen and music director, Vincenzo Rana accompanying on piano.
The production opens with a real theatrical tour de force. The red lights which glow through a noisy background obscured by stage smoke turn out to be a reversing lorry, which disgorges the members of The Memphis Clowns, complete with Elvis wannabee.
Sadly, however, this level of invention was not sustained, and the facts of life of piano-accompanied opera were inescapable - you need a pianist who is a lot more than a good repetiteur and singers who have something special in voice or artistry to shine in the musically impoverished background, or who have acting skills and a director capable of exploiting them to help bridge the gap.
In this production it was the Tonio of Davide Damiani which achieved the greatest sense of depth. The Nedda of Mary O'Sullivan had some affecting moments. But elsewhere there was simply too much straining after notes and effects.
I'm with Dr Tom on this one. Let's put piano-accompanied opera to rest just like piano-accompanied flute or violin concertos. - Michael Dervan
Pondjiclis, RTÉCO/Wagner, The Helix, Dublin
Semiramide Overture - Rossini
La mort de Cléopâtre - Berlioz
Symphony No 6 (Pastoral) - Beethoven
No wonder Berlioz's La mort de Cléopâtre failed to win the Paris Conservatoire's Prix de Rome composition prize. The 26-year-old composer broke just about every rule in the book; and in the Conservatoire that book was long.
This work of wayward genius is dominated by declamatory singing of an unusually intense kind, supported by orchestral ideas that are strikingly literal, yet that transcend mere effect.
The RTÉ Concert Orchestra and its conductor Laurent Wagner played this compelling music straight, with no attempt to polish it up, yet with a firmness of purpose that did justice to its vividity.
The mezzo-soprano soloist, Sophie Pondjiclis, was a star, with strong stage-presence, and in total command of inflections of music and text. She and everyone else understood that this music is designed not as an eccentric concert-opera, but as elevated recitation. Easily said; much harder to do.
Beethoven himself gave his Symphony No. 6 its "Pastoral" title. Its present familiarity makes it hard to realise that this too is a revolutionary work. So it was rewarding to hear it being played as such.
One of the reasons for this freshness was the way in which Laurent Wagner appeared to allow the musicians to discover each detail for themselves.
His conducting shaped things by metre more than by the beat; and this gave each movement a firm sense of direction and ample shape.
Another reason was that each movement's character was defined around the composer's titles.
The first movement was faster than the pacing of tradition - cheerful, as the composer said he felt, rather than tranquil. The second movement, the "Scene by the Brook", burbled along with a flexibility that was sometimes astonishing. It was liberating - for the players, the audience and the music. - Martin Adams
The RTÉCO's "Beethoven Plus" series continues at the Helix on Saturday. For details telephone (01) 700 7000 or visit www.thehelix.ie.
