Final curtain for Opera Ireland

As Opera Ireland prepares to take its final bow – the current production of Toscawill be its last – Michael Dervanlooks at the potted history of the artform here and asks what this means for the new Irish National Opera

IMAGINE THIS. You’re asked to direct an opera on short notice and you find yourself having to argue your rehearsal time up to a grand total of 10 days in an artform where four to six weeks are the norm. But when rehearsals actually start, the lead singers simply don’t show. And your designer has difficulty getting the measurements of the heroine, who then decides to bring and wear her own costume.

This is not a fantasy. It's what happened to director Ben Barnes and designer Wendy Shea when they worked on a Dublin Grand Opera Society production of Toscain 1985. Barnes chose to have his name removed before the programmes were printed.

Was this the nadir of the DGOS? Or was that the dayglo Turandotproduced and designed by Dario Micheli in December 1986, the last gasp of the old-style DGOS before Michael McCaffery became artistic director in 1987? Could it have been the unseemly quick despatch of McCaffery's successor Kenneth Richardson in 1991? Or perhaps it was Dieter Kaegi's 2001 Don Carloswhich the Timesin London lampooned in the headline "Carry on, Carlos," with a strap that ran "Did you know that Don Carlosis a rollicking farce? Neither did our correspondent" (the redoubtable Rodney Milnes).

In my opera-going lifetime it’s always been easy to have a go at Opera Ireland and its predecessors, the awkwardly-named DGOS/Opera Ireland, and the DGOS pure and simple. The reason is not hard to find. The DGOS was founded in 1941, and its glory days were well before my time, from the late 1940s to the 1960s.

In the early years, the DGOS hosted visits by leading European companies. The casts were mouth-watering. And later it had subvention from the Italian government for a focus on Italian opera, and Pavarotti sang in Dublin before he was heard in London.

But things got so bad that in 1983 the Arts Council’s annual report (not usually a forum for dressing down clients) voiced concern “at the production and design standards achieved by the Society and early in 1983 [the council] stipulated that it should engage a separate designer and producer for each production and should increase expenditure on sets, costume and design.”

Things improved once Michael McCaffery was installed. When I first reported on the company's work for the British magazine Opera Nowin 1991, I wrote, "The high spots of recent years included a thought-provoking Pêcheurs de Perlesdirected by Mike Ashman in 1987, an inventive, La Dolce Vita-style, updating of Don Giovannifrom Patrick Mason in 1988, and a gripping Dublin premiere of Peter Grimesdirected by Tim Hopkins in 1990. There has been singing of note, too. Nuccia Focile's vocally enchanting Norinain a 1987 Don Pasquale, Virginia Kerr's rivetting Léïlain Pêcheurs de Perlesand a thrilling Cavaradossifrom Maurizio Saltarin in a 1990 Toscaimmediately spring to mind."

And when Dieter Kaegi became artistic director in 1997 he put Irish opera lovers in his debt by mounting productions of a swathe of repertoire that was new to the company: Boris Godunov, Salome(both 1999), Katya Kabanova , Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk(2000), Handel's Giulio Cesare, Mark Anthony Turnage's The Silver Tassie(2001), Handel's Imeneo(2005), André Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire(2006), Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking(2007), Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos(2008), Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa(2009), as well as Wagner's Das Rheingoldand Bellini's I Capuleti e I Montecchiin concert performances.

SO WHY HAS OPERA IRELANDlong been the victim of so much flak? Well, in the Kaegi years, standards have been extraordinarily variable. For a company producing two seasons a year with two operas in each season, that meant that a single dud effectively created a season failure rate of 50 per cent.

The variability made it virtually impossible for the company to put together a string of successes. And on top of that, going back to the 1980s, the company had a series of most appalling of financial woes. It limped from crisis to crisis, burdened by deficits. And its situation was compounded by an Arts Council which welched on successive endeavours to put opera funding on a more realistic footing.

In a way, however, all of these issues are peripheral.

The biggest issue has been that Opera Ireland has never really sustained a persuasive sense of direction. Backing A Streetcar Named Desireand Dead Man Walkingwas a real comedown from Boris Godunovand Salome. (To be fair to Kaegi, the company never yielded to his wish to stage an even greater work, Berg's Wozzeck.) And, with output stuck in a rut of 18 performances a year (when crises weren't causing cutbacks) the company was presenting only a fraction of what it used to manage.

The drop is staggering. 1960-69 saw 370 nights of opera, with 98 productions. 2000-2009 brought 166 nights, with 34 productions and three works given in concert performances. Imagine what we would think if the 21st-century services of Aer Lingus or RTÉ, were less than half their levels of the 1960s.

Mention of Aer Lingus and RTÉ brings us to the nub of the problem, as they both have a history of being national providers. Opera Ireland in its various incarnations seemed the natural body to bring this country the kind of permanent, year-round, national opera company that even the poorest of European nations manage to support. Sadly, this was never to happen, and the company never showed a coherent ambition to develop in that direction.

Countries such as Finland and Norway had thriving national companies in spite of sharing Ireland’s lack of a national opera house (a deficiency remedied in Helsinki in 1993 and Oslo in 2008). Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera were founded later than the DGOS (1946 and 1962, respectively), yet both managed to become fully-fledged national opera providers.

Even Íslenska óperan in Iceland, serving a population of 308,000, managed to send out a psychologically important message by giving native singers annual contracts, a signal of intent that has never been seen here.

Again, the Arts Council didn’t help matters. Back in 1998 when the council engaged in a series of public consultations about its second-ever arts plan, I attended a session on opera held in Malahide. No one from the council even mentioned the idea of a national company, nor did any representative from Opera Ireland do so. The council set up committee after committee, and, even when it agreed to increase the funding, it never reached its own targets.

The council may well have seen the vagaries of Opera Ireland as a valid excuse. Opera Ireland may well have felt defeated in the face of the council’s effective sidelining of opera. Either way, if you’ll forgive the cliche, we are where we are. For all its successes, Opera Ireland has failed. And what about the new Irish National Opera that Martin Cullen brought into being and that Mary Hanafin has so obviously been stalling over? Well. Let’s try the hardest thing of all in the current climate.

Let’s try to be optimists.