Riccardo Zandonai's Conchita (1911) is the third, and weakest of this year's operas at the Wexford Festival. The work is based on the 1898 novel, La Femme et le pantin (The Woman and the Puppet) by the French writer and close friend of Debussy, Pierre Lous. Zandonai had hoped to create out of Lous's cigarette factory worker in Seville another Carmen. The scarlet lady of the opera is a girl who chooses to kiss and tease, keeping her man, Mateo, in his place until, in the last of four, short acts, he becomes violent, catches her by the hair, throws her to the ground and, after a single blow, secures recognition for his true love.
Abusive relationships probably don't come much more trite than this, unless it's in one of those B-movies now shown on late-night TV for viewers who cherish their particular brand of risible gaucherie. There's nothing to be found in Wexford's Conchita, either from the work itself, or in the production, singing or conducting, to ameliorate the appalling vista of emptiness Zandonai presents.
You might indeed suggest that director Corrado d'Elia and his designers (Fabrizio Palla, sets, Steve Almerighi, costumes) have chosen to meet like with like. The prevailing drabness, the failure to make anything more than the most cliched stabs at Spanish flavour, combined with the unrelenting, unsympathetic singing of the two leads (Monica di Siena and Renzo Zulian), and conducting (Marcello Rota) which fails to ignite, make for one of the most dispiriting offerings I can recall at Wexford.
