Operatic life in Ireland is scandalously under-resourced, and this can't continue, maintains Michael Dervan
It would be hard for anyone to disagree seriously with the issue raised recently about the Wexford Festival in a Letter to the Editor (October 25th) by Lindsay Armstrong. The Wexford Festival, he wrote, has become "a large, one-way import depot".
He complains about "imported artistic director, imported conductors, imported soloists, imported stage, lighting and costume designers, imported chorus, imported orchestra!"
Equally, it's hard to argue against any promoter's right to engage in such importation. Such an argument would deny Irish singers their successes on the stages of London, Vienna, Milan, as well as other centres, major and minor. These achievements are only possible if there's two-way traffic.
The defence has been put up by Jonathan Baum (October 29th) that Wexford's problem is that of "any small town anywhere in the world that stages a large festival". He instances Glyndebourne, Spoleto and Aix-en-Provence.
However, Glyndebourne uses British orchestras (the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment), as Aix-en-Provence does French ones (Ensemble Intercontemporain, Les Arts Florissants, the Orchestre de Paris). And both use native singers, conductors, directors and designers. You'll also find Italians featured in the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, much as you'll find Finns at Savonlinna or Swedes at Drottningholm.
The Wexford situation is a real oddity. If the festival were to disappear tomorrow, nothing much would change in the infrastructure of opera in Ireland as it impacts on the lives of opera practitioners here.
Yes, the performances of some obscure operas would be missed, as, of course, would the large programme of ancillary events. Yet, now that Opera Ireland has raised its standards and broadened its repertoire, it's no longer the case, as it was for so long here, that the best experiences of large-scale opera are almost automatically to be had at Wexford.
You could even argue that if Wexford were to disappear, the greatest loss would be to tourism in the south-east region, which benefits hugely from a welcome lift in an off-season month - 35 per cent of the audiences in the Theatre Royal come from abroad.
The festival has in the past explained itself by pointing to the issue of artistic independence. Its artistic director, Luigi Ferrari, is paid to make the artistic choices he believes in. If he has no taste for what Ireland can offer in the way of creative teams or performers, and if the festival's board has given him no brief to represent Irish talent, then it can be no surprise that the festival is the way it is.
If there is a fault here, it doesn't lie with Ferrari, but with the festival and its board.
The presence of the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus in the pit for the last two Wexford Festivals is a slightly different matter. This is the outcome of a failure in negotiations between the festival and RTÉ over the use of the National Symphony Orchestra. RTÉ had been subsidising the use of the NSO in Wexford, but the breach was not just about money. And when it occurred, the festival had little choice but to look eastward for an option cheap enough to avert the serious deficit that would otherwise have been incurred.
The breakdown between RTÉ and Wexford created an outcome that neither organisation is pleased with. Both sides lost face, and much more besides. Although negotiations for the re-employment of the NSO at Wexford are ongoing, it would take a great optimist to predict a return to the festival by the RTÉ players.
There's an issue of far-reaching concern here. The Arts Council does not fund main-scale opera in Ireland well enough for the companies who are dependent on it to do other than seek facilities from RTÉ at non-commercial rates. This arrangement is both a benefit and a bind. RTÉ has made it clear that no expansion of its orchestras' work in opera is possible. So no national opera company can ever develop here while the dependency on RTÉ remains.
The use of singers from the Czech Republic as the festival chorus since 1995 has occasioned less comment. The chorus it replaced was in any case an international one, its membership chosen on the basis of open auditions. And the Czech singers have been altogether more consistent in performing standard than the players from Belarus.
The issue which composers like to raise about the lack of new Irish operas in Wexford, resurrected again by Roger Doyle (October 31st), is a real red herring. Have Irish composers not noticed that the festival is a forum for operas that, for one reason or another, have failed to make a lasting mark? It should be the fervent hope of all living Irish composers that, unless there's a change of festival policy, their work should never even qualify for consideration in Wexford. They can hardly want to be, operatically speaking, the Stanfords, Balfes or Wallaces of the future.
But the marginality of Wexford's activities to the infrastructure of professional operatic life in Ireland is an issue that's not going to go away by itself. The festival is renowned for its rare repertoire, its tiny theatre, its unusual location, and its unique atmosphere. It's hugely successful - attendances have been running at 100 per cent for years - and internationally the best-known musical event in the Irish cultural calendar.
Yet the chorus of disapproval about the passing over of Irish talent continues to rise. Mostly it's discussed in terms of casting. But it extends well beyond singers, beyond even Lindsay Armstrong's list to repetiteurs, beyond the main Theatre Royal stage to the Opera Scenes and lunchtime recitals.
Operatic life in Ireland is scandalously under-resourced. We have no permanent national opera company. Dublin has no opera house. Only the touring company, Opera Theatre Company, has engaged with Irish composers in commissioning and presenting new work on a chamber opera scale. The Wexford Festival's €800,000 grant accounts for fully one third of the Arts Council's annual opera expenditure. Yet the festival's feedback into the professional structures of opera in Ireland has effectively dried up.
It's not a situation that can reasonably be allowed to continue - unless the Wexford festival wants to be seen more as a contributor to the bedrock of tourism than the long-overdue development of opera in Ireland.
Michael Dervan is the music critic of The Irish Times