Just one of those crazy things

Wexford Festival Opera thrives on challenge, and has managed minor miracles over the years, writes Michael Dervan, as the first festival in the new opera house opens tonight

THE WEXFORD FESTIVAL is one of those crazy things that should never have happened. No, I'm not suggesting a comparison with the current financial crisis. Think instead of something on the lines of man learning to fly, or the invention of submarines.

The south-east corner of Ireland in 1951 was anything but obvious as a location for a new "Festival of Music and Arts," as the festival originally called itself. But there's no law to govern where or when visionaries will fire themselves up to action. And the men who dreamt up the first festival - Tom Walsh, Seamus O'Dwyer, Eugene McCarthy, Pat Liddy, Desmond Ffrench - probably had no notion of the durability of what they were founding.

The festival has endured in spite of the major changes that were made to the pattern of repertoire (apart from Balfe's Rose of Castilein the first year, rare or obscure opera was not an early preoccupation), a theatre that was barely suitable for opera (it was modified again and again over the years), and an Irish public purse that has long been at the miserly end of generosity towards the arts.

The infrastructure of opera in Ireland, don't forget, is among the least developed in Europe. Even after all the wealth that was generated by the Celtic tiger, Dublin doesn't yet have an opera house or even the promise of one, nor does the capital city have a company that can provide opera on a year-round basis.

The craziness is continuing. The Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, formally opened the new €33 million Wexford Opera House last month, and the world is just about to sample the first productions on its spanking new stage.

What's crazy about that? Well, Wexford town, population 18,163, is located in a county of 131,615 with three-quarters of its natural hinterland covered by the sea. There's no late train service to Dublin, and yet there's been talk of resident theatre and dance companies, and a programme of events to attract audiences from Dublin on a regular basis. Even at posh Glyndebourne, public transport offers a better deal.

The handsomely-finished warm woodiness of the new auditorium looks set to bring creature comforts that will be new to the experience of opera in Ireland. With a bit of luck, the sound will be of a quality to match. Onstage and backstage things are a bit tighter. The wing areas are limited and will restrict the design and mobility of sets.

The onsite facilities can't fully accommodate rehearsals for all three of the festival's operas, so off-site rehearsals are still a fact of life.

Wexford's is not a year-round opera house. National companies in the opera houses built in recent years in Copenhagen and Oslo typically have staffs of 500 or 600 people. A €33 million build on a small site couldn't fulfil the demands of a year-round national company.

That's why, back in the early 1990s, the Glyndebourne Festival in East Sussex (population 492,324) was able to build its new opera house for about a third of the cost of the then new home of Finnish National Opera.

But Wexford has always thrived on a challenge. As early as the second festival in 1952, The Irish Timesreview of its L'Elisir d'amorestrongly advised Dublin opera lovers "to spare no effort to hear this opera" and the writer (who signed the article "B") said it was "undoubtedly the best operatic production by an Irish company that I have ever heard". Wexford had leap-frogged over the DGOS, and that's pretty much how public perception of the companies' ranking has remained since.

As a student I fell foul of some poor DGOS productions, and they tarnished my early experience of live opera. I've written before of that company's "fondness for over-ripe, ill-disciplined singing, minimally coherent stagings and often perfunctory musical values" and how going to Wexford mapped out possibilities that I hadn't expected to encounter in opera in Ireland. In such an primitive theatre with a tiny stage, Wexford managed minor miracles.

The festival's track record is one of wringing triumphs out of adversity. The new theatre may not be state-of-the-art in the way that recent new opera houses costing more than 10 times as much obviously are. But the new house has huge transformational potential. Even the apparently small matter of the greatly enlarged orchestra pit opens up tranches of repertoire that were previously no-go areas.

It's unfortunate that the Arts Council's long-promised quantum leap in the funding of opera has yet to materialise. And doubly unfortunate that the festival has taken possession of its new house at a time of unprecedented international financial turmoil and the certainty of severe cutbacks in public funding of the arts. If necessity is the mother of invention, Wexford is at a point in its history where inventiveness is going to be crucial to survival. The complexity of the current challenges will call on Wexford's craziness to an extent never seen before.

• The Wexford Festival Opera opens tonight with Rimsky-Korsakov's Snegurochka, (The Snow Maiden) and runs Oct 19, 22, 25, 28 and 31. Richard Rodney Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur runs tomorrow, Oct 20, 23, 26, 29 and Nov 1. Pedrotti's Tutti in Maschera, (Everyone in Disguise) runs Oct 18, 21, 24, 27, 30 and Nov 2. Details from http://wexfordopera.com