The beauty of the lesser spotted opera

Diehards will have noticed with some satisfaction that this year’s jubilee Opera Festival is being celebrated with true-blood Wexford repertoire in the form of three lost operatic treasures

IT WAS 60 years ago when Dr Tom Walsh resolved to put on the first Wexford Festival. He had noticed an uncanny resemblance between his home town in Ireland and Aldeburgh in East Anglia, where Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears had initiated a major international music festival in 1948. A local opera production (Balfe’s

The Rose of Castille

) was already in preparation, and, encouraged by the writer Compton Mackenzie, Walsh eked out a programme of complementary events. It didn’t matter that his hard-up committee had unanimously voted against it.

Fifteen years later, when Walsh retired as artistic director, the 11,500 townspeople of Wexford were playing host to an established annual event, now with three operas per season, a wealth of visiting talent from home and abroad, and a burgeoning reputation for repertoire that was, in the doctor’s words, “seldom if ever performed”. The success of his vision can now be measured in the gleaming purpose-built theatre that has been the festival’s nerve centre since 2008.

Walsh’s grá for lesser-known 19th-century Italian material has by and large been upheld by his six successors, for nearly all of whom the back-catalogues of Donizetti and Rossini in particular have proved rich veins. But the scope has broadened: of the 162 operas so far presented on Wexford’s main stage, just over one in eight has dated from the 17th or 18th centuries, and almost a quarter are from the 20th century.

The festival has not traditionally identified itself with the work of living composers, and by 2004 had only produced four such works. However, American conductor David Agler has more than doubled that figure since his appointment as artistic director in 2005. The festival's unique ethos might be evolving but it has yet to stage a new opera by an Irish composer, having pulled Brian Irvine's Dumbworld, which was originally scheduled for 2009.

Diehards will have noted with satisfaction that this year’s diamond jubilee is being celebrated with true-blue Wexford repertoire: three lost operatic treasures are to be the vehicles for an unusually large proportion of principals new to the festival, and the test beds for a newly founded Festival Chorus that succeeds the long-standing chorus in residence, the Prague Chamber Choir. And while savings have been made by reducing the number of main performances from the usual five to four, the shortened schedule remains abuzz with concerts, recitals, and the ShortWorks matinees.

This year's festival opens with what has already been hailed as a rediscovered gem, Ambroise Thomas's La Cour de Célimène. Although its initial run at the Paris Opéra-Comique in 1855 fizzled out after just 19 performances, the score burst forth in a highly acclaimed release on the Opera Rara label three years ago. This first staged revival honours the bicentenary of the composer's birth.

The setting is a Parisian chateau in 1750 that is home to two widowed sisters, a countess and a baroness. The countess, whose character derives from the perfidious Célimène in Molière's Le Misanthrope, seeks revenge on the entire male sex for the philandering of her late husband. She thus entertains herself with a bevy of suitors.

Foremost among the suitors are a complacent commander, to whom Célimène is actually engaged, and an ardent chevalier, who falls prey to her wiles. Offstage events take a bloody turn, but thanks partly to the availability of the baroness, everyone – jilted suitors included – gets to live quite happily ever after.

For Thomas, the quick demise of the unlucky 13th of his two-dozen operas marked the onset of a mid-life crisis from which he would not emerge until radically reforming his style. What the dwindling audiences didn't realise was that they were witnessing one of the last operatic manifestations of the true esprit française– a sunny blend of wit, clarity and moderation that would soon be swamped in the heady lyricism of Gounod's Faustand, eventually, Thomas's own great hit Mignon(staged at Wexford in 1986).

Nineteenth-century French opera-goers just weren't ready for the countess's extrovert immorality, nor did they warm to period detail that smacked of the ancien régime. Today, there are no barriers to enjoying the classical charm of Thomas's music, particularly its elegant coloratura, intricate ensemble work, and novel instrumental colourings. The production will be a noteworthy Wexford debut for Irish bass John Molloy (as the commander) and soprano Claudia Boyle – whose titular part is one of the most significant roles entrusted to an Irish singer since the late Bernadette Greevy starred in Handel's Ariodantein 1985.

By far the darkest and most romantic of this year's offerings owes its inception to a competition, held in the early years of the last century by the newly founded Warsaw Philharmonic, for an opera based on a seminal work of Polish literature, the poetic novel Maria. (Its author, the spendthrift aristocrat Antoni Malczewski, self-published his solitary masterpiece in 1825 just months before dying a pauper at the age of 32.) The winning entry was the work of Roman Statkowski, a Russia-trained composer then in his mid 40s with one recent operatic success to his credit but – to the eventual disappointment of his wide circle of admirers – little more ahead of him than 20 years of academic drudgery. For the moment, however, Mariahad captured the popular Polish imagination.

Set on the windswept eastern plains of 17th-century Poland, the opera tells a grim tale of ruthless paternal ambition. The humble Maria is blissfully married to Waclaw, but her powerful father-in-law, the Wojewoda, is bent on his son’s remarrying a woman of higher social rank. To that end, after sending Waclaw off in the company of Maria’s loving father, Miecznik, he orchestrates her murder. The disconsolate Waclaw resolves to take his father’s life in return, but following an encounter with Maria’s ghost, instead takes his own.

Statkowski took the opportunity to throw in the most venerable of Polish patriotic songs, the medieval Bogurodzicaor Hymn to the Mother of God; this, along with the rousing choral mazurka that closes Act I, contributed in no small way to the opera's early success, and it was twice revived before the composer's death in 1925. The score perished in the second World War, and it is thanks to the chance survival of a set of orchestral parts that any performances have been possible.

For this, the first production of Maria not on Polish soil, designers James Macnamara and Fabio Toblini have updated the action to the Solidarity era. There’s a Polish conductor (Tomasz Tokarczyk) and a mostly mother-tongue line-up of principals (the one exception is Italian soprano Daria Masiero, cast as the titular victim). The prominent role of the chorus poses exciting challenges for director Michael Gieleta and chorus-master Gavin Carr.

The programme takes an inevitably lighter turn with Wexford's best-loved composer, Donizetti. Gianni di Parigi, the 15th of his 85 operas to enter the Wexford canon, is a frothy farce about a dauphin who, incognito, gatecrashes an inn to check out a princess from Navarre whom he has never met, but who is on her way to Paris to be married to him.

Giannihas lately attracted the attention of Italian festivals, meaning that two principals bring experience gained last year to their respective Wexford roles. They are Uruguayan tenor Edgardo Rocha, who sang the dauphin at the annual summer opera festival at Martina Franca in Italy, and Czech soprano Zuzana Marková, who understudied the part of the princess at the Itria Valley festival. There's also a part for Ireland's own Fiona Murphy, who after conspicuous success as a mezzo is this season making her way as an unconditional soprano.

While the musical and dramatic qualities of Gianniare now recognised, the opera memorialises a curious political miscalculation on Donizetti's part. In 1831, flushed with the success of Anna Bolenaat Milan the previous year, and with the notable triumph it had yielded for the celebrated tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini, the composer set his sights on Paris, where Rubini was now establishing himself. Grasping a second-hand libretto, he dashed off a new score and sent it to the tenor, pledging him the dedication and the performance rights.

Unfortunately, an opera by Boieldieu based on the same story, Jean de Paris(1812), was still a firm favourite in Paris, and Rubini was clearly intent on parts of a more romantic hue than the gallant dauphin. In the event, the premiere had to wait until 1839, when it was given at Milan without Donizetti's permission.

It goes to show that the operas of old could founder for all sorts of reasons, leaving Wexford with a seemingly inexhaustible legacy of neglected works.

And it's already rumoured that in 2013 the festival will outdo even Dr Tom Walsh's principle of "seldom if ever", with the unveiling of a 19th-century Italian opera that has neverbeen performed.

Something on the side

This year's ShortWorks side-productions include Mad for Opera, a newly concocted anthology in which company members explore themes of insanity from across the repertoire. Double Troublepairs two operas about couples who just can't communicate, Menotti's The Telephoneand Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti, while the range of contrasting emotions is completed by Puccini's irresistible little comedy Gianni Schicchi.

Conductor Gavin Carr and his brand new Chorus of Wexford Festival Opera offer a rare chance to hear Brahms's Ein Deutsches Requiemin the composer's authorised version with two-piano accompaniment.

The festival’s own orchestra gives a Beethoven programme conducted by Carlos Izcaray (including the Violin Concerto with soloist Fionnula Hunt), and the brass and percussion are being let loose to present a little pageantry of their own.