The Wexford Festival's first principal guest conductor, Maurizio Benini, was a man with a special interest in the early years of romantic Italian opera. His successor, Daniele Callegari, is interested in what was going on around 100 years later. The composers of the first half of the 20th century - men like Giordano, Respighi, Montemezzi and Zandonai - were unfortunate in their lifetimes to live and work in the shadow of the great Puccini. And things haven't improved posthumously, certainly not in their native country.
So Callegari is delighted about his Wexford appointment because it gives him the opportunity to work in a repertoire that he loves and that there is very limited scope to work on in Italy. As usual, there's a veil of secrecy over future Wexford repertoire. "I don't know if I can tell you," he says in response to a direct question, "I have to speak with Luigi Ferrari, the artistic director." The only work he mentions at all, with hesitation, "Probably . . . I'm not sure," is Conchita by Zandonai. It was in Zandonai's Cavallieri di Ekebu that Callegari made his festival debut last year. It was an auspicious debut in what was the most theatrically viable of the 1998 offerings. "Zandonai stirs up the heady ingredients of the plot with filmic glee," I wrote at the time. "Daniele Callegari conducts the cunningly orchestrated concoction with such sweep that you would think the NSO playing in the pit was twice as large as the number that can be accommodated there."
One of the paradoxes about Callegari's favoured operatic period is that it was the time when Italian opera lost its international dominance. Puccini's Turandot, left incomplete at the composer's death in 1924, was the last of the line. Italy hasn't since produced an opera that still travels the world. Later works by Berg, Janacek, Britten, Stravinsky and Ligeti have had a success which works from the Italian repertoire have been unable to emulate.
Callegari turns out to be rather unforthcoming when I inquire about this. He points out that while Puccini was alive, it was very difficult for the other composers in Italy. "Probably the melodies aren't so memorable that the people can sing them," he suggests, and nominates Respighi as the most important post-Puccini composer of Italian opera. Trying to get any further with the question draws a blank. "I don't know, because I don't like contemporary music.
"Take a composer like Berio. I know that he is a very big musician, but I don't like that music. I don't feel it in myself, in my body."
What seems strange about this is that Callegari's musical studies included percussion and double bass, and, in fact, he trained as a conductor when he was working as a percussionist in the Orchestra of La Scala in his native Milan. Given the limited role played by percussion in Western music before the 20th century, it's unusual to hear a percussionist, even an ex-percussionist-turned-conductor, distancing himself from the bulk of the interesting music for the instruments of his choice.
On the other hand, Callegari's enthusiasm for the work he's conducting at Wexford this year, Siberia by Umberto Giordano, seems to know no bounds. He points out that Siberia was Giordano's favourite among his own operas. It was highly praised by Faure and, suggests Callegari, it had an influence on the two operas Richard Strauss composed in the years immediately following its premiere in 1903, Salome and Elektra.
Callegari sees Siberia as being "symphonic" in a way that's rare in the output of Italian opera composers. He sees it, in a way, as a symphonic poem, and thinks this was the aspect of it which influenced Strauss. The instrumentation of Siberia, he says, is very important. "Giordano didn't use a lot of material, and with only a little material he wrote three big acts, about a half-hour each. Not big in duration but big in emotion. They're not the same thing, you know. There are pieces like the Ave Verum by Mozart, just four minutes, which are really big . . ." Callegari is celebrating the Strauss connection by programming his tone poem, Don Juan, as part of his orchestral concert with the NSO during the festival, and coupling it with Brahms's First Symphony, which is for him "one of the best symphonies ever".
He struggles with his English as he talks about the opera. "I think that there is inside this opera a big conception about the theatre. I can imagine what exactly happened on the stage, even without the stage, because in the score everything is clear. You can imagine your personal stage, if you study this score exactly. It's very, very interesting."
Siberia, he says, is a problematic work for singers. You need a big sound to carry over what's happening in the pit. And with the Wexford pit being so small, it's easier to balance the vocal and orchestral elements in the Theatre Royal than it would be in any opera house of more conventional scale.
"In Wexford, this kind of opera sounds better. If you want to do this kind of opera in a big theatre, it's very dangerous." There's no question but that he's going to be enjoying himself in Wexford, attempting to prove Luigi Ferrari's claim that the original effect of many 20th-century Italian operas can be better recreated these days in Wexford than in any larger theatres. Judging by the success of last year's Cavallieri di Ekebu, the omens are good.
