With Irish opera facing upheaval, one of its key centres, Wexford, should be wary of giving up its reputation as a place to hear work that simply can't be heard anywhere else, argues MICHAEL DERVAN
OPERA IS IN ferment. The Arts Council has yet to row back from its radical decision to bring about a Lazarus-like transformation of the art form in Ireland. The council decided last July to ditch its support for Opera Ireland, Opera Theatre Company and the Wexford Festival Opera, and to create instead a new national opera company based in Wexford. The Minister for Arts, Sports and Tourism, Martin Cullen, has a different view, however. He’s in favour of a national opera company, but wants to see it based in Dublin, where any rational opera-lover would rather see it.
But the Minister has yet to reveal how he’s going to turn his vision into a reality.
Meanwhile, in Wexford, one of the most radical upheavals in the landscape of Irish opera has been taking place without much in the way of public debate or critical comment, as the festival’s artistic director, David Agler, breaks a range of long-standing traditions.
Wexford has, of course, broken traditions in the past. For example, the use of surtitles was debated for years and years, and then introduced without fuss. This year saw an improvement on last year’s television screens, with a conventional display at the top of the stage. Sit at the front of the stalls if you want to miss them, or don’t mind craning your neck to read.
It wasn’t Agler, though, who made the move over surtitles. His quiet revolution has been in the area of repertoire. English-language works, heard just twice in the 25 years before Agler, have featured in all of the seasons for which he has been responsible, with American composers strongly to the fore. He has also embraced the operatic mainstream (Fauré’s Pénélope and Dvorak’s Rusalka) and has featured more work from the 20th century than any of his predecessors.
His repertoire choices have been catholic but they have also been chaotic (with all kinds of chopping and changing), and in one particular case, utterly inexplicable: he announced Donizetti’s L’Ajo nell’ imbarazzo for 2006 before realising it had already been done before at the festival, which doesn’t repeat its repertoire. It seems incredible that neither the artistic director nor anyone else at the festival spotted the gaffe in time.
But his most far-reaching innovation has been to embrace productions that originate elsewhere. The Busoni/Stravinsky double bill of 2007 and Pedrotti's Tutti in maschera in 2008 both originated in Italy. And this year, John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versaillescame from Opera Theatre of St Louis (where it was premiered in July) and will be mounted again in Canada, at Vancouver Opera as part of the 2011/12 season.
Co-productions make sense for opera companies. Costs are shared, and everyone can get more bang for their buck. Anyone who saw this year’s Ghosts will have realised that Wexford, particularly with money as tight as it is right now, would not have been able to fund such an elaborate staging on its own.
BUT WEXFORD’S SITUATION is different from that of most opera companies. It’s a niche festival, and one with a very particular reputation for unearthing rare, neglected and forgotten works by composers who themselves are sometimes forgotten figures. One of the festival’s unique selling points has been that you could hear operas at Wexford that you simply couldn’t hear elsewhere. Agler and the complicitous festival board have simply thrown away one of the festival’s most distinctive features.
The question could be posed in a simple manner: is the festival’s future success and reputation best served by having elaborate productions that opera-lovers can catch elsewhere, or by having less lush stagings that can only be experienced by paying a visit to Wexford? Or is the festival happy with the view presented in the St Louis Post-Dispatch, that “St Louis now has a great reputation among opera-goers in Wexford, where The Ghosts of Versailles was a hit”.
The festival is touting the St Louis connection as an important and ongoing one. And that now raises further questions. Wexford Festival Opera has not announced next year's repertoire, but St Louis has. Mozart's The Marriage of Figaroand Tchaikovsky's Eugene Oneginare obviously non-runners in a festival of rare opera. Sondheim's A Little Night Musicwould take the festival out of the realm of opera. So that leaves Wexford to share The Golden Ticket, by Peter Ash.
The golden what, by Peter who, I hear you ask. Well, The Golden Ticketis a new work, based on Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Peter Ash is an Iowa-born composer resident in London, and a conductor who is artistic director of the London Schools Symphony Orchestra and music adviser to the Roald Dahl Foundation.
The Golden Ticketwas commissioned by an organisation called American Lyric Theatre and Felicity Dahl. Excerpts were presented last month in family previews at the New York Chocolate Show, and there's even a sampling on Facebook.
WEXFORD'S 2009 programme was anything but vintage, and international critics have not so far been kind to The Ghosts of Versailles. American opera does not go down particularly well in Europe. The introduction of such recent repertoire has been called "a dilution of the Wexford ethos" in the Financial Times. For the London Times, there was "never a dull moment; but never a meaningful or truly dramatic one either". And the Sunday Timesslagged off "Corigliano's empty operatic nostalgia trip".
But, forget about the critics. Irish composers will certainly be on Wexford’s case if new works are going to become festival fare. Why not an Irish work, they will ask of a festival that’s already been in hot water about its standoffish relationship with Irish musicians, singers, directors and designers.
The ditching, through co-productions, of what has hitherto been the festival’s cachet could have altogether wider ramifications for its international ranking. The St Louis connection could, paradoxically, improve the production standard and at the same time diminish the festival’s unique reputation. Kudos to St Louis, not to Wexford.
