After endorsing marriage equality, Ireland surprised Germany for the second time last week by showing it can also do opera. The Wexford Festival Opera was given an enthusiastic reception in Berlin on a visit by the company to let opera-lovers, arts journalists and tour operators in Germany know more about one of Ireland’s leading cultural events.
While in town, they also revived an old, little-known tie between Berlin and Wexford – more of which later.
As birthplace of Beethoven and the two Richards, Wagner and Strauss, Germany is crazy for opera. So much so that, even in these times of tight public finances, having a state-supported opera house is a matter of pride for any city worth its name. Generous subsidies mean that a cheap opera ticket is often no more expensive than a trip to the cinema.
So with 80-odd German opera houses and countless touring productions, is pushing the Wexford Festival Opera in Germany not a case of bringing coal to Newcastle? Not a bit of it, apparently.
“In Wexford visitors get a unique repertoire you don’t get elsewhere so it’s perfect for an audience as well-versed in opera as the Germans,” says soprano Jennifer Davis after a recital in the Mendelssohn Museum.
The striking space beneath the Irish Embassy on Berlin’s Jägerstrasse was once the cashier hall of a family bank owned by the uncle of composer Felix Mendelssohn. A place so historically rich in music and money – two crucial ingredients for putting on opera today – was an ideal location for the event.
Davis – on her first performance in Germany – delighted her Berlin audience with a recital of opera arias and lieder in four languages.
Her virtuoso yet unstuffy performance is not the kind you see in Germany every day of the week and demonstrated precisely what the Irish can bring to opera.
While some in Ireland remain stuck in the “opera isn’t part of our tradition” groove, dozens of talented Irish singers have quietly fanned out across Europe to impress audiences. Wexford is a chance to bring it all back home.
“It would be nice for Germans to come to Ireland, precisely because they’re such opera fans, to see what great singers we have,” says Davis, enjoying a well-earned drink as Berlin audience members came to pay their delighted, if shock-and-awe, respects at her performance.
“We associate a lot with Ireland in Germany but not opera,” says audience member Barbara Stolle from Berlin.
After trips to Brussels in 2013 and Paris in 2014, the visit to Berlin was about extending the reach of the European “friends” of the festival.
For festival chairman Ger Lawlor and chief executive David McLoughlin, this was a chance to show Germans what they get in Wexford: a chance to be up-close and personal with rarely seen works and the people creating them.
The 64th festival will run this year from October 21st to November 1st with three evening operas: Koanga by Frederick Delius, Guglielmo Ratcliff by Pietro Mascagni and Le pré aux clercs by Ferdinand Hérold.
“Wexford is one of our few festivals with an international brand promoting lesser known work and new talent,” McLoughlin says.
Germany is not entirely new terrain for the Wexford festival. In its early days, festival founder Tom Walsh sought out Carl Ebert, artistic director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Born to a Polish count and Irish-American mother Ebert was adopted by a German family and was a well-known silent film actor.
After five years heading the Berlin opera the anti-Nazi Ebert fled Germany. In exile he helped found the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in the UK and, under Atatürk’s patronage in Ankara, a Turkish national music conservatory.
It was after Ebert’s return to Berlin in the 1950s to rebuild the Deutsche Oper that Walsh came calling and offered him a role as a guest director in Wexford.
"Don Quichotte was an opera which Carl Ebert always wanted to do and in Wexford he got his chance," says Victoria Walsh-Hamer, daughter of Tom Walsh who died in 1988.
“Ebert was a great friend of the festival, as was his son Peter,” says Walsh-Hamer in Berlin. “It’s strange how things come full circle again.”
While in Berlin, Wexford Festival Opera chairman Lawlor and chief executive McLoughlin also paid a courtesy call to the Deutsche Oper and met the dean of performing arts at the performing arts school, the Universität der Künste.
As well as increasing Wexford’s profile in Germany, the Irish visitors hope to tap young performers here for future festivals.
“It would be great to let people know the thing that is different about Wexford,” says Lawlor. “It’s the sense of community and the sense of fun.”
www.wexfordopera.com
