It's hard to imagine that the founders of the Wexford Festival could have foreseen what they were actually creating back in 1951. It's a far cry from Balfe's Rose of Castile - the festival's sole offering in its opening year - to works like Nicholas Maw's The Rising of the Moon (seen in 1990), Pavel Haas's Sarlatan (1998), or Martinu's Mirandolina (to be seen next year).
This year's operas at the Theatre Royal revisited a composer not featured in Wexford since 1956, in the staging of Flotow's Alessandro Stradella, and also reminded us of two areas of repertoire the festival has visited rather more frequently - opera from Eastern Europe (in Dvorβk's Jakob∅n), and, through Sapho, the works of Massenet, who comes in fourth in the most-performed list at Wexford, behind Donizetti, Rossini and Verdi, with Mozart right behind him.
Critical and popular opinion are largely united on one of this year's works. Alessandro Stradella, included as a sentimental gesture to the festival's earliest decade, found itself few new friends, serving only to highlight how operatic taste has changed over the last half century.
Dvorβk's Jakob∅n seemed to me to be the clear winner; but Sapho, for all its longueurs and the holes in its more than usually realistic plot, had its advocates too. Things, you might think, have been working normally if Wexford comes up with one opera out of three that everyone is happy to have seen, even if there's disagreement about which of the operas is the one. But the British critics, the quickest into print after those at home in Ireland, have been painting quite a different and altogether more negative picture.
Wexford, which used to be treated by the British press as a little gem of a festival, unique in its atmosphere, and working miracles in a minuscule theatre on a minuscule budget, has somehow gotten under their skin.
"It's a turkey," ran the headline over Hugh Canning's dismissal in The Sunday Times. Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph and Tom Sutcliffe in The Spectator created the core of an unexpected chorus with headlines both bemoaning the "lack of the Irish". This duo's critical assessment of the works and performances on offer pictured the standard mixed success that accurately represents Wexford's achievement over the years - a hit rate of one in three with operas from the scrapheap of history is not bad by anybody's reckoning. But their griping tone about the festival itself is inescapable. Even the altogether more sober-voiced Michael Kennedy in The Sunday Telegraph suggested that Wexford is relying on singers who are "most of them much inferior to what one might hear up in Dublin with Opera Ireland".
Well, now. What's up? It is, I think, the oddest of post-colonial problems. I well remember a British critic lamenting loudly during the first festival for which current artistic director Luigi Ferrari had responsibility. His concern was about all the foreigners who had suddenly been imported into Wexford. In detecting that Ferrari had hired in a choir from Prague to complete the professionalisation of the chorus, and had brought with him a number of continental colleagues in important musical and other support roles, he was absolutely right. The kink in the vision was seeing the use of "foreigners" as a new development. What he had failed to notice was that those British acquaintances of his who used to fulfil those very roles were every bit as foreign in Wexford as Ferrari's Czechs and Italians.
With the exception of Dr Tom Walsh, one of the festival's founders, all artistic directors before Ferrari had been British. What happened after Ferrari's first festival in 1995 is clear. Wexford ceased to hold its affectionate place in the provincial periphery of British operatic life as seen from London. What was once viewed fondly with dewy eyes is now seen in the harsher reality of foreign-domination and the rather more challenging reality of Celtic Tiger Ireland. The physical discomfort of the Theatre Royal, its inappropriateness for large-scale opera, the crushes at the bar in the interval, the range of shortcuts that enable the festival to survive, are now, it seems, irritants rather than the charms they were interpreted as in the past.
You may well view all this as a very particular form of critical petulance and pique, but it's not quite that simple. The festival has been working hard to raise its standards. Hence the reform of the chorus.
Ferrari had the pit extended, and the inclusion of a second double bassist worked wonders for the solidity of the orchestral sound. Away from the Theatre Royal, the "Opera Scenes" (90-minute versions of standard works) are a huge improvement on the "Operatic Scenes" (pot-pourris from various works) that Ferrari inherited, although the variability of the piano accompaniment still needs some sorting out. Two weeks of lunchtime vocal recitals now ensure that whenever you turn up during festival time, there will be more than just an evening opera to attend.
Rising standards lead to rising expectations which, it has to be said, the National Philharmonic Orchestra from Belarus did not contribute to at this year's 50th anniversary festival. I seem to have enjoyed their playing more than most of my colleagues, but that was at times by dint of reading musical intentions in the face of flawed delivery. The festival has, understandably, been secretive about the failed negotiations which led to the breach with RT╔ and its National Symphony Orchestra. But the absence of clear information on such an important issue is likely to germinate larger doubts in already suspicious minds.
There may not be much to be done about the effect of Ferrari's Italo-centric taste on minds and ears that are otherwise inclined. On the orchestral front, however, there does seem to be a clear way forward.
It's surely time now for the Arts Council to acknowledge its responsibilities in the area of opera, and to fund the provision of opera orchestras for Opera Ireland and the Wexford Festival, rather than leaving this to RT╔. If we are ever to make a serious move towards greater operatic provision in Ireland, let alone the establishment of a national opera company - something which has to be regarded as an essential step in developing employment opportunities for trained musicians in Ireland - then an orchestra will have to be created at some stage. At the moment, a contract orchestra, guaranteed work for a number of months through playing in Dublin and Wexford, would be an important first move.
Wexford's plans for physical expansion, by extending the existing auditorium and building a new performance space on property already acquired, seem to be stalled. In the new world order created by the terrorist attacks in the US last September, no Irish government can think as freely of committing the large amount of money the festival is seeking, a sum of the order of £20 million. Good news, on the other hand, is that demand for tickets has never been so high, with the "Opera Scenes" as well as the main operas managing to sell out well in advance of the festival opening. And the Italian record label FonΘ has been in Wexford this year, making recordings which are expected to appear on CD within the next 12 months. The 50th anniversary season will be the first for which all three operas will be commercially available on disc.
Who knows, if FonΘ's project works out commercially, maybe next year's performances - of Mercadante's Il giuramento, Martinu's Mirandolina and Auber's Manon Lescaut - will appear on CD in due course. Whatever the British critics may say, Wexford's little miracle seems set to continue for a long time yet.
