It's a great time for Wexford Festival Opera. Box-office receipts for the main programme of rare operas at the Theatre Royal have exceeded 95 per cent for the eighth year in a row, writes Michael Dervan
The festival has lodged a planning application for the most ambitious expansion yet of its home theatre, which will raise the seating capacity to 750, greatly increase potential box-office yield and bring the front-of-house, auditorium and backstage facilities fully up to the norms of the 21st century. And the American conductor, David Agler, who has just taken over as artistic director, has announced a season of opera - Donizetti's Maria di Rohan, Fauré's Pénélope, and Carlisle Floyd's Susannah - that signals a clear change of direction from the balance favoured by his predecessor, Luigi Ferrari.
But it's also a difficult time for the festival. The Arts Council, which funded it to the tune of €800,000 this year, warned Wexford in December about its "failure to nurture Irish opera artists and practitioners" and asked the festival to "respond with vigour" to its concerns. The Musicians' Union of Ireland (MUI), exercised about Wexford's use of foreign orchestras since 2001, has called on the Arts Council to withhold further grants to the festival until "the issue surrounding the exclusion of Irish-based musicians" has been resolved. A spokesperson for the Arts Council recently reiterated its position to me, saying: "The question of the artists is very important for us. We will be raising the issue urgently with the festival." The festival's building plans, first announced in 1997 with a timescale of three to five years, have missed the boat on both the Celtic Tiger and the millennium celebrations. The rebuilding of the Theatre Royal, says the festival, will leave it homeless for at least one year, creating a major headache about exactly what to put on and where. And the vagaries of Government funding for the arts have seen Wexford lose serious ground in Arts Council support. Since 2001, Arts Council funding has fallen a cumulative €289,000 below the level necessary to keep pace with inflation. The shortfall in 2004 alone was €108,000.
In public, the absence of Irish singing talent at Wexford has been the occasion for much comment. The finger has usually been pointed at Ferrari, although it's the board that's ultimately responsible for policy in this area. For the moment, though, the issue getting the greatest amount of attention is the hiring of foreign musicians, from the National Philharmonic of Belarus (2001-2003) to the Cracow Philharmonic from Poland this year. The path that led to this development is curious enough to be worth recounting.
In what might now seem like the good old days, a benign RTÉ provided an orchestra to Wexford, and, in a quid pro quo weighted in the festival's favour, acquired radio broadcasting rights for the three opera productions.
The overall cost of the exercise to RTÉ was affected in 1990 when the 88-player National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) was created out of the 72- member RTÉ Symphony Orchestra - the pit in Wexford accommodates no more than 50 players. A few years later costs rose again after RTÉ, without apparently thinking of the consequences for Wexford, agreed to a change in terms and conditions for its musicians which made it unfeasible for an individual player to work in all three operas. Rotation became necessary, with more players travelling to and from Wexford and being paid expenses on days they were not working.
By this time, RTÉ was already clawing back some of its costs from the festival, although the State broadcaster has never, it says, actually sought reimbursement for the staff salary costs involved, but only for the travel, subsistence and other expenses incurred in servicing the festival's needs. In spite of the rising numbers all round, the orchestra continued to play in Wexford, and the festival continued to make a contribution to RTÉ's costs. However, the change from simple patronage to a partially paid-for service seems to have sown the seeds of future discord.
In September 2000 there was a dirty three-way wrangle, with RTÉ claiming exclusive broadcasting rights. This would have squeezed out the BBC, which had for many years made - and paid separately for - its own live relays from Wexford. Wexford and the BBC disputed RTÉ's claim, and the weight of evidence was against RTÉ. The BBC broadcasts went ahead as planned.
Worse was to follow. In April 2001, this newspaper revealed that the festival had broken with RTÉ and hired in an orchestra from Belarus. Wexford's chief executive, Jerome Hynes, expressed regret at the absence of the NSO but added that the use of the new orchestra "underlines the international nature of the event, and presents exciting new opportunities for both the orchestra and the festival, which we look forward to developing". RTÉ expressed disappointment at leaving the festival. Negotiations have been resumed in advance of each festival since, without any resolution emerging.
RTÉ explains that it would need to recoup all non-salary expenditure incurred at Wexford. The festival's position is that the differences between the two sides involve not just money but also other issues, the precise nature of which has never been divulged.
Earlier this month, festival chairman Paul Hennessy issued a statement in which he said: "It is not an ideal situation, where there is only one Irish provider capable of meeting our needs and, despite protracted negotiations over three years and more, we have not been able to reach agreement with RTÉ for the provision of the orchestra on terms which apply internationally. The board and executive have devoted enormous time to this matter and are unanimous in concluding that to agree to the terms offered by RTÉ would be grossly irresponsible."
When I asked him what those terms were, he declined to explain them.
"It is ironic," he continued, "that we have no choice but to look overseas for these services and indeed they are on offer to us from several other distinguished European orchestras, all of whom wish to play at Wexford and are able to do so at a cost which is considerably less than that quoted by RTÉ. We have always been prepared to pay market rates, but do not see why we should be expected to pay more than this. Indeed we fail to understand why it is necessary to pay more for the services of an Irish orchestra than it is for a comparable European alternative."
Hennessy declined a request to identify the countries or orchestras involved in Wexford's comparisons.
The festival has, however, confirmed that it made no effort to secure Arts Council funding to bridge the gap that had opened up with RTÉ. It has also acknowledged that it expressed no interest in using the 45-member RTÉ Concert Orchestra rather than the unsuitably large RTÉ NSO. And at this year's festival press conference, Ferrari declared that the hiring of an Irish freelance band was an unacceptable option, because players of the required quality could not be sourced here.
The players from Belarus did not fare well in Wexford. It can have given no one any pleasure that in 2001 the Times in London described the NSO as having been replaced "by the not very good (but cheap) National Philharmonic of Belarus". The Financial Times reported Wexford as being "reduced to importing the none-too-impressive National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus, a bizarre state of affairs at Ireland's premier music festival". A year later the Daily Telegraph reported: "Yet again, this year's Wexford Festival has not, to my knowledge, employed a single Irish singer, producer, designer, conductor or orchestral player. The natives appear to be regarded as drones round here, and creativity is left to foreigners."
To be fair, the festival's course of action needs to be viewed in the context of what you might call the ArtsCouncil funding climate for opera. As Pamela Smith's Arts Council-commissioned report, Towards a Policy and Action Plan for Opera, put it in 2002: "The Arts Council's funding of professional opera in Ireland since 1996 has had very little impact on the number of main productions of opera each year, the training and/or career development opportunities for opera practitioners, or the amount of education and/or outreach activity in opera."
Given that the NSO accounts for around 60 per cent of the €13.4 million RTÉ spends on its performing groups, the salary cost borne by RTÉ in providing the orchestra to Wexford would today be in the region of €1 million. In other words, when the NSO last played in Wexford RTÉ's below-the-line subsidy of Wexford must have been on a par with, if not actually greater than, the Arts Council's annual grant, which in 2000 amounted to €633,043.
Neither Wexford nor RTÉ is willing to divulge the actual points of contention that caused the fallout other than that the money gap is a six-figure amount. But, such are today's disparities of income between Eastern Europe and Ireland that Wexford appears to have been able to import orchestras with a playing strength of around 65 from Belarus and Poland for a figure that has to be broadly comparable with maintaining the admittedly larger NSO in Wexford at the expense rates paid to RTÉ employees. Back in 2001 the orchestra from Belarus seemed like a stopgap, a signal to RTÉ that alternatives were available. But the stopgap now appears to have become a permanent state of affairs.
RTÉ has used its freed-up orchestral time to give extra concerts in Dublin and engage in valuable community projects, bringing music to schools and communities in Kerry, Donegal and Cork. These activities, an RTÉ spokesperson confirmed, "would not have been either physically or financially possible in the climate of the last number of years, if the NSO were playing in Wexford".
Wexford has had to live through a drop in orchestral standards, though the Cracow Philharmonic this year was an improvement on the Belarussians. It now faces the added embarrassment of seeking public money to help fund a €24 million building to house an Irish festival which, for years, has been notorious for the low level of involvement of Irish performers in its productions.
Wexford may choose to place emphasis on the fact that it's an "international" festival. But most international opera festivals have a far stronger relationship with the creative talent of their home countries than Wexford. Leaving aside the fact that Dublin has an even greater need of an opera house than Wexford, it's hard to imagine the Government being unconcerned about the non-employment of Irish talent when considering the use of taxpayers' money for Wexford's building plans.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to a matter of will. Wexford is to be applauded for its courage in 2001 in showing that RTÉ's long-standing orchestral monopoly could in fact be broken. Unfortunately, since that time, the festival seems not to have taken seriously the idea that a non-RTÉ Irish alternative might actually be possible, and that, as a contribution to Irish musical life, such an alternative might not only be worth fighting for but, in the long term, actually worth paying more for too.
The use of RTÉ orchestras in opera has long distorted the market for freelance musicians, who cannot compete with a subsidised service any more than they can with musicians working in Ireland at eastern European wage rates. It has been RTÉ's subsidised service which has enabled the Arts Council to keep its funding of opera at such an artificially low level. The arrangements that made sense in the Ireland of the 1950s and 1960s have ended up hampering the development of the musical infrastructure in the 21st century.
If you think the Arts Council doesn't have the resources, consider the fact that at the end of the 1995-97 Arts Plan, which set out "to strengthen the position of art forms which are currently considered weak", the council was injecting an extra annual £2.1 million (€2.67 million) into drama, which could hardly be considered as weak as opera in the Irish context.
The most obvious solution is the creation of an orchestra contracted to service the needs of Irish opera companies. This would help Opera Ireland as well as Wexford. Properly planned, it would broaden the pool of freelance players able to make a living in this country, and benefit a wide range of activities, including those of Opera Theatre Company, where orchestral musicians are required. It could, in fact, provide a boost to the employment of musicians in Ireland even more significant than the creation of the NSO back in 1990 (the biggest boost since the 1950s) or the establishment of the Irish Chamber Orchestra in Limerick in 1995.
It's actually among the next logical steps for a country that neglects professional music like no other in Europe. If David Agler sorts out the other Irish talent issues in Wexford, as he seems set to do, a true Irish solution to the orchestral challenge in Wexford might make us all grateful in the end for the strange interregnum which has seen Belarussians and Poles playing in the pit at Wexford for the last few years.
Wexford Festival Opera runs until October 31st; www.wexfordopera.com
