The history of the Cork Opera House begins, unlikely though it may seem, with the fact that Cork' s first sewers were installed in 1830. That civic development initiated a structural renewal of the city's streetscape; the quay walls were lined with white limestone cut from the quarry at Beaumont near Blackrock, and the river was forced deeper into its two channels, with the tributary streams blocked and paved. As a result the old Customs House, now the Crawford Gallery of Art, gave on to a square, Nelson's Place, rather than on to a quay.
Its immediate neighbour on the quay enclosed by the reclaimed ground would be the concert hall known as the Athenaeum. Its balustraded, pillared bows framed an eight-bay wall on to the river. When Sarah Bernhardt came to perform here she was rowed up-river to the quay steps, still across the street from what is now the Cork Opera House.
Today the Main Drainage Scheme, the first major sewer renewal since 1830, hammers away along Lavit's Quay and Half Moon Street. From inside the Opera House, the smooth curves of the new three-storey glazed facade match the curves of white limestone with which the new granite paving of Emmet Place is decorated. Again, sewers and renewal go, if not exactly hand in hand, at least step by step. This is appropriate enough, given that the local authority has had so much to do with both elements in Cork's public life. The redesign of Emmet Place is part of the Cork Urban Pilot Project to revitalise the heart of the city; and the Opera House is not only at the city's very heart, it is also at the heart of Cork's bid to become the 2005 European City of Culture.
The pillars, porticos and classical statues of the 19th-century Opera House had disappeared by the time the shabbier but still beloved building was destroyed by fire on December 12th 1955. City Architect Neil Hegarty is just one of many who remember where they were when the flames soared into the winter night: he watched from the portico of St Mary's Dominican church across the river, realising that when, a week earlier, he had helped backstage with the Cork Operatic Society production of The Belle of New York, he had pulled across the final curtain on the final show in the old Cork Opera House.
The trauma of the fire is still spoken of today almost in whispers, even by those who have believed for 35 years that the only answer to the Opera House's problems is another fire.
At the time of the fire the theatre was run by a private company (headed by Commander George Crosbie of The Examiner family); when plans for its replacement took shape, a symbiotic process merged members of the board and members of the fund-raising committee. But old rivalries affected the award of the design contract, a dilemma only solved by splitting the commission between two architectural practices: E.P. O'Flynn and John Wilkinson of Chillingworth and Levy as joint architects. At the same time, the Cork architect Harry FitzGerald Smith, who was also a member of the Cork Operatic Society, offered a design which reproduced the original Opera House - a concept supported by Wilkinson - but this sent the board into further difficulties. The compromise was the appointment of Michael Scott (actor as well as architect) as consultant to the project. In fact he more or less took over the entire scheme with his partner Robin Walker.
Scott's template or reference for the new design was the Opera House at Malmo, in Sweden. This sits in parkland, and so it was proposed that the Cork theatre would be located beside the river on the Western Road, where Jury's Hotel is now. There it would have been backed by the massive spires of St Fin Barre's Cathedral and flanked, a couple of hundred yards away, by the fine entrance gates of the university college, with the south channel of the Lee flowing past. However, it was considered that this would move the Opera House too far away from its audience, Cork's north-side and Marsh dwellers, who thronged the "gods" and kept the custom known as "early doors" by taking advantage of price reductions and entertaining themselves until the programme proper began.
The centre city was accepted as the heartland and the design was redrawn for Emmet Place. Ironically this meant that the "gods" were abandoned. Harry FitzGerald Smith's plan would have delivered that level of seating, but the modern scheme made it prohibitively expensive. Expense also excluded the plan to build in brick, which would have aligned the new theatre with the Crawford Gallery, its red-brick neighbour, and might have alleviated the impact of the north wall facing the river.
The structure of concrete, aluminium and glass which was officially opened by President Eamon de Valera in 1965 brought with it a legacy of complaint. It was that awareness of inherited dislike which prompted current chairman Charlie Hennessy to make the re-fashioning of the Opera House his key commitment when he took over in 1991. He was replacing Harold Johnson, whose financial stewardship over six years as chairman gave Hennessy the foundation from which to move into a £6.2 million programme of capital expenditure. Advised by Neil Hegarty, he introduced an architectural competition administered by the RIAI and won by Murray O Laoire for the building which will be formally opened on Saturday by Minister Sile de Valera.
It was Cork Corporation's decision to keep the Opera House open with a five-year grant scheme amounting to £1.2m from 1991 to 1995 which allowed the development to be completed. Recently, the Corporation loaned the Opera House another £1 million. The body's willingness to become a partner in cultural projects has made possible such developments as the as Wandesford Quay gallery development, the Gate Cinema at the North Gate Bridge, the exciting extension to the Crawford Gallery and the emerging new wing of the City Museum on the Mardyke. Millennium funding of £750,000 was also crucial to the building programme.
There are still tensions at the Opera House: the little Half Moon theatre has to compete with the Half Moon Nightclub and so, in terms of behaviour, does the main auditorium, which is now surely the only Opera House in Ireland where patrons bring tray-loads of drinks into their seats. But the nightclub is the cash-flow solution to cashflow problems; and so popular that a more staid version is to be introduced on the top floor of the new building.
Some windows have been introduced to the infamous north wall which faces the river, but the main change that has been made to the wall is a newly erected electronic advertising screen. The fact that Murray O Laoire could make the application for planning permission and that City Hall, originators of the prize-winning urban renewal scheme which made the redevelopment possible, could allow such an addition to the theatre roof-line is just one of the contradictions implicit in the whole history of this building.
For the present the auditorium remains unchanged, although the foyer is greatly enhanced with a central door into the stalls, a cafe and larger bar areas and a porched main door. The curved balconies of the two upper floors are deliberate echoes of the plazalike square outside, where the granite paving is decorated with Cork limestone, which weathers to the characteristic white seen all over the city. Murray O Laoire were involved in the design of this space, although the traffic bollards are the choice of project designers at City Hall's engineering department. Above them leans the huge glazed frontage of the Opera House, giving panoramic views east, west and north and, through the teamwork of Murray O Laoire and main contractor John Sisk, reasserting the river as Cork's defining attribute.
