Music/Tom Walsh's Opera: A History of the Wexford Festival, 1951-2004: Tom Walsh was a connoisseur and keen historian of opera all his life: he published at least three books on the subject, and he knew the genre better than most. The festival which he so memorably (and controversially) founded, and for many years tirelessly nurtured, reflects even now that compelling synthesis of pragmatic determination and enchanted engagement with the further reaches of the repertory which characterised his endeavours from the beginning, writes Harry White
Bel Canto was at the heart of this enterprise, a fact attested by the prominence of Bellini and Donizetti in the festival's early years. So too was a determination to bring opera to Wexford and, insofar as he could, Wexford to the opera. In this determination, his robust personality invariably entailed a degree of confrontation (notably with Radio Éireann), even as it ensured that the Festival not only survived but flourished beyond his grasp, or indeed his bravest imaginings.
Festivals breed controversy (the proverbially feudal struggle at Bayreuth in recent years is a convenient example), but feuding to good purpose is finally a tolerable state of affairs. To judge from the council minutes of the Wexford Festival which Karina Daly has so diligently and meticulously scrutinised, it seems clear that Walsh's effort to expand the repertory at Wexford ran foul of Alfred Beit in later years, just as it had earlier thrived under the more benign inspiration of his great mentor, Compton Mackenzie.
"Walsh and Wexford, Anthony and Cleopatra, Napoleon and Josephine, bacon and eggs, these things just went together and that was the end of it," wrote Brian Quinn in Hibernia in 1967. A year later, Walsh resigned. The festival itself, however, endured. Although it would continue to struggle with the permanent spectre of financial ruin (threatened by deficits which today seem risibly small), the appointment of artistic directors and council chairs such as Brian Dickie, Barbara Wallace and Elaine Padmore secured Wexford's claim to pre-eminence as an opera festival which explored an unfamiliar but compelling repertory in adverse circumstances that otherwise would have seemed impossible to surmount. In this respect, Daly gives due prominence to Ian Fox, himself a vital authority on opera, who in 1977 masterminded a fund-raising campaign that redeemed the Festival from catastrophe.
But further misadventures were to follow. Although A.J. O'Reilly, Guinness Ireland and RTÉ (somewhat tenuously) lent crucial support in the early 1980s, the sudden withdrawal of Arts Council funding in 1986 (which unhappily prefigures a similar withdrawal in respect of Opera Ireland years afterwards), seemed to betray a fundamental difference between the priorities of the Arts Council and the pursuit of opera in Ireland. It is scarcely credible that as recently as 1987, the sum total of the Council's grant to Wexford was £13,000. (In the same year, Wallace secured a grant of £30,000 from the National Lottery).
As one reads this book it is difficult not to conclude that despite the lustre of its achievements (specifically in relation to the quality and astonishing range of the operas mounted in Wexford), the Festival has at best enjoyed an uneasy rapport with those avatars of Irish culture who publicly or privately determine the State's commitment to European art music. Daly incisively remarks that "the Festival ended its lengthy relationship with RTÉ because it could no longer afford to bring the [National Symphony] orchestra to Wexford". The appointment of the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus in 2001 - an appointment which endures at the time of writing - speaks not only to the perennial resentment which Irish musicians understandably express at their "exclusion" from Wexford (a complaint hitherto limited to the engagement of singers and conductors), but more pervasively to the ambiguity which again and again typifies Ireland's cultivation of European music.
This elegant book advances that ambiguity for inspection, even as it celebrates the decisive contribution which Wexford has made not only to opera in Ireland, but to the genre itself, as an essential expression of European identity. It deserves a very wide readership in Ireland and in Europe, and its numerous photographs will stimulate fond memories for those who love this Festival.
Readers of this review deserve an admission, if not a confession: the book contains an epilogue which gathers together personal reminiscences on the significance of the Wexford Festival by Bryan Balkwill, Peter Ebert, Victoria Walsh-Hamer, Asa Briggs and the author of this review. Now that I have read Karina Daly's absorbing and extensively researched history of the festival, I am very glad to commend what is a handsomely produced and copiously illustrated volume.
Harry White is Professor of Music at UCD and president of the Society for Musicology in Ireland
Tom Walsh's Opera: A History of the Wexford Festival, 1951-2004 By Karina Daly Four Courts Press, 226pp. NPG