Riccardo Zandonai (1883-1944) Premiere: Teatro dal Verme, Milan, 1911 Conductor Marcello Rota; director Corrado d'Elia; set designer Fabrizio Palla; costume designer Steve Almerighi; lighting designer Rupert Murray Sung in Italian

A Headstrong heroine who works in a cigar factory in Seville and drives her man demented - sound familiar? Puccini rejected the libretto of Conchita in 1907, presumably on the grounds that it sounded like a re-run of Carmen, but Riccardo Zandonai was made of sterner stuff - this was, after all, the man who was to set one of his operas (the 1925 I Cavalieri di Ekebu) in a Swedish iron foundry, with surprisingly entertaining results, as Wexford audiences discovered to their delight when the work was staged at the 1998 festival. In fact, Conchita makes Carmen seem like Mother Teresa, for, in this earlier opera, Zandonai appears to have been intent on pushing his exploration of the female psyche into the territory of psychopathology. Her victim is the hapless Mateo, with whom she is ostensibly in love, but whom she taunts and torments in a series of cruel mind games. Their on-off affair shifts from the cigar factory to a bar where Conchita has a regular gig as a stripper, and then to a country house belonging to Mateo, where she declares she will welcome him with open arms. Instead, she locks him out and, as he watches helplessly from outside his own gate, has a quick fling with a passing youth. After a violent argument, during which Conchita is severely beaten, the pair eventually fall into each other's arms and declare eternal love.

So, a happy ending? Yeah, right, says Corrado d'Elia, Conchita's director, smiling in a manner that suggests things may not turn out quite so simply in his production of Zandonai's extraordinary, overheated opera. "There are two different levels in this opera," he explains. "One is the logical field and the other is the illogical field. We have split the character of Conchita; we see a lot of Conchitas on stage. Mateo is the logical part; his will be the audience's point of view, and probably the audience will be on his side, while Conchita represents the illogical. We don't want to know the reason for her behaviour - it's not what we want to study. It's just the starting point - Conchita behaves in a very strange way, that's all. We won't discover whether she does it because she plans to, or whether she is schizophrenic, or just crazy. It doesn't matter."

Isn't it a somewhat risky theatrical strategy, though, to have a heroine with whom the audience doesn't identify? "But Conchita is a very fascinating character, because she's not just mean - sometimes she sings in a very fascinating way about love. And she's very sexy, too. Don't forget Mateo falls in love with her at first sight; and when she is dancing in the bar, her audience adores her, like a goddess almost. There are very beautiful musical moments in the opera; the music tells about amore e dolore, love and pain. The most important theme of the opera is speranza - the hope to reach love." D'Elia, who graduated as an actor from Milan's Civica Scuola d'Arte Drammatica before founding a centre for theatre training and research, doesn't believe the libretto of Conchita is misogynistic.

"Some of the lines are written from a man's point of view, that's true - Mateo says things like `now you are mine' and that's probably a misogynistic way of seeing love - but you must remember that it went on stage in 1911."

To win a woman's love by beating her is, even in the year 2000, a proposition which will doubtless provoke a good deal of debate, but d'Elia believes the opera will win people over with its dramatic setpieces and highly-coloured orchestration, whose authentically Spanish ambience has invited comparisons, not with Bizet, but with Manuel de Falla.

As for the action, he says he is concentrating on getting authentic performances from both his principals and chorus. "Conchita and Mateo must feel exactly what they're singing - that's the most difficult thing. And the opera is very static, especially in the third and fourth acts, so we will work with the actors as if they were theatre actors. You won't see people standing still and singing."