Wexford's operatic trilogy

Alessandro Stradella, by Friedrich Flotow (1812-1883)

Premiere: Stadttheater, Hamburg, 1844

Conductor: Daniele Callegari Director: Thomas de Mallet Burgess

Designer: Julian McGowan

Sung in German

Friedrich Flotow was an almost exact contemporary of Richard Wagner - but there, it must be said, the similarity ends. Wagner changed the course of operatic history with his blockbuster tales of Nibelungen derring-do. Flotow wrote Martha; a sweet little opera of the pretty tunes tied up with pink ribbon variety, but hardly an earth-shattering piece of theatre. It is, however, one of the most stubbornly popular of mainstream operas - something which certainly could never be said of its predecessor in Flotow's operatic oeuvre, Alessandro Stradella.

Based on an episode from the life of a real-life 17th-century Italian composer, the story begins when Stradella, visiting Venice for the carnival, rescues his beloved Leonore from the clutches of her wicked guardian Bassi. They elope to the countryside, and are preparing for their wedding when two of Bassi's henchmen turn up, under orders to kill Stradella. He, however, invites them to join the party - and sings a Robin Hood-style romance, which praises the compassion shown by robbers and bandits to the poor. The killers are so moved by this performance that they abandon their murderous plan.

Bassi arrives to check up on them - and, appalled by their change of heart, increases their fee to such an extent that they agree to kill Stradella after all. All three bad guys sneak up on the honey-voiced hero just as he is rehearsing the hymn Jungfrau Maria for the feast of the Virgin Mary the following day: and are so impressed by his singing that all three duly kneel down, join in, 'fess up - and live, as does everyone in the opera, happily ever after.

So - a romp, then? Alessandro Stradella's genial English director, Thomas de Mallet Burgess, isn't convinced.

"There are wonderful ensembles and stomping good arias and music which is kind of uplifting," he says. "But the opera is really quite problematic. The biggest theme is the idea of art, and the power of art to change our lives - but for me as a director there's also a big question mark over how a theme like that is treated. I mean, the two murderers repent because Stradella's hymn to the Virgin Mary is so overwhelmingly wonderful. Now it's very difficult, in the 21st century, to go: 'oh, yeah, absolutely. . .'

"It seems to me to be a very aristocratic, Catholic, German view of life, the universe, and all the rest. I mean, if you look at the way women come across, for example. Not that I think there's any need to get political at all - but you can't ignore these things. You can't get away from the fact that it reflects some very conservative ideas about the essential ingredients of a good life. After Stradella marries Leonore, the first thing he says to her is 'go down to the kitchen, darling, and get the food and drink'. So do you just pretend that doesn't happen? You can't. You have to do something with it."

Is the opera's conservative political ethic a problem for de Mallet Burgess, on a personal level? Does it mean he's inherently unsympathetic to Alessandro Stradella as a piece of theatre? Absolutely not, he says. "Whether I share the view of the composer or not, what he and the librettist deserve is the best possible chance for the work at this moment in time. To bring it to a contemporary audience so that they can react to it in a meaningful way."

What he has decided to do is set his production in a theatre. "The audience will come in to a bare stage, with just a sign saying 'Ruhe Bitte' - 'Quiet please' - and a bare bulb hanging down. At that point a lot of people will probably think Wexford has gone broke - the 50th anniversary and they can't even afford a set. Which is a bit of a game, too. Anyway, the time is the 1930s or thereabouts; it may be a theatre, it may be a film set, it doesn't matter. In wanders an actor, and that actor is Stradella.

"I wanted to find a way of using this theme of the transforming power of art. I thought that what we might understand today, more than the power of art to change our lives in quite the grand way that it does in the opera, is the power of art to change our imaginations - to free us from a set way of thinking. We see that all around us, after all, in public art, in architecture, in galleries and so on. I want to challenge the audience to accept that you can have an empty space with a rather crumbling back wall, and that that can become something very beautiful."

This is in tune with de Mallet Burgess's conviction that opera, as an art form, could do with being released from a straitjacket of its own making. "We have so far to go with opera," he says. "What interests me about directing opera is the amazing challenge that you get from combining words and music together - because they come from different planets. Music, it seems to me, comes from this distant, angel planet of perfection; text comes from this earthbound place of imperfect expression. Put the two together, and wow!"

Sapho, by Jules Massenet (1842-1912)

Premiere: Opera Comique, Paris, 1897

Conductor: Jean-Luc Tingaud

Director: Fabio Sparvoli

Set designer: Giorgio Richelli

Sung in French

Na∩ve young man from the provinces arrives in Paris, falls for beautiful dame, discovers her shady past and retreats to the country: it has to be either La traviata, or one of those French films in which nobody works, yet everybody lives in chic apartments, dresses in designer threads and flits from one party to another. And in truth, Massenet's opera Sapho is a very French work, both in its subject matter - l'amour - and in its treatment of love as a subject worthy of serious analysis.

This is no shouting match, but a subtly shaded study of a relationship which begins as an idyll and ends in quiet despair. Fanny Legrand, an artist's model nicknamed "Sapho" by her detractors, meets Jean Gaussin at a party; they fall in love and go to live together in the country. He is unaware of her promiscuous past until his bohemian friends from Paris arrive for a visit while she is out: glad to see you're not with that awful Sapho woman any more, declare the lads, and the whole torrid tale emerges. Furious, Jean searches Fanny's things and discovers a box of letters which reveals - among other things - that she has a child. After trading insults he walks out on her and returns to his family. She visits him to try to persuade him to change his mind, but he says it's all over. A year later, he's back - he can't live without her. He falls asleep and Fanny, convinced that he'll never be able to forgive and forget, steals away.

Fabio Sparvoli glances at my notebook and groans. "Vous avez tous ces questions pour moi? Oh, mon Dieu. . ." We have decided to conduct the interview in French - more accurately, The Irish Times has selected French as the least daunting from a range of options offered by Sapho's Italian director as he enters the room. What follows is, necessarily, a somewhat impressionistic rendering of the conversation.

Would he agree that the opera is a psychodrama? Not exactly, he says - that's putting it rather too strongly. As Massenet understood it, it's a case of love and different types of people. On the one hand you have Jean, the honest plodder, and on the other, the artists, bohemian folk who work crazy hours, turn night into day and so on. Jean loves the country, Fanny is a city girl. "Yet her dream is to have a normal life - she wants to have babies, make breakfast, have her husband go to work and come home in the evenings. That's her dream."

What fascinates Fabio Sparvoli, however, is the disparity between the plot of the opera and that of the novel by Alphonse Daudet on which it is based. The book is, he declares, "incroyable" - beautifully written and considerably more complex than the opera. "In the novel, class distinctions are very important; in the novel, Jean and Fanny don't really love each other at all; in the novel, Jean's family is very rich and he is not an ingΘnu but the son of an ambassador who has come to Paris to study as a diplomat. It's a completely different point of view."

It's beginning to sound as if he wishes he were dramatising the novel instead - but the very idea makes him chortle. "Oh, no, absolutely not. This music of Massenet's is formidable. There are many wonderful melodies and it's very, very romantic - if you lose yourself in the music, it's like moving into a dream, very soft, very vivid. I don't know why this opera isn't given in the theatres of Europe."

But then the same could be said of Giordano's Siberia, which Sparvoli directed at Wexford two years ago: a stylish affair which packed a memorable theatrical punch. The libretto of Sapho refers to a snowstorm: will this be Siberia revisited?

"No, because we had snow in Siberia, and I don't want to do the same thing," he says. "In this opera, the winter is a metaphor for sadness, loneliness. But the idea of our design is to recreate the iconography of the impressionist painters - Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Degas. In the early part of the opera, it's as if the artists invite the girls from the Moulin Rouge to party with them."

As for that ambiguous ending, he plans to make it more ambiguous still. "It's a little ridicule, this ending - in our version, he has a bottle, he drinks a little too much, he fall asleep. OK. So Fanny kisses him and he murmurs something in his sleep, but doesn't wake up. I ask the question, if he had woken up, would she have had the courage to leave him?"

Jakob∅n, by Anton∅n Dvorβk

Premiere: National Theatre, Prague, 1889

Conductor: Alexandre Voloschuk

Director: Michael McCaffery

Designer: Paul Edwards

Sung in Czech

Czech mates, might be a better title for this comedy with a nationalistic spin. Count VilΘm has disinherited his absent son Bohus, who has become embroiled in revolutionary shenanigans in far-off Paris. Bohus and his wife Julie turn up in the village just as a villainous cousin, Adolf, is given the key to the castle; anxious to keep a low profile, they seek shelter with the village schoolteacher and choirmaster, Benda. When Bohus is arrested as a Jacobin, Julie goes to the castle to plead for his release; convinced and moved by her performance of a lullaby that his wife used to sing to the baby Bohus, the count makes his peace with his son. A sub-plot involving Benda's daughter, Terinka, her boyfriend Jir∅ and his rival, an elderly cohort of the count, is sorted out in favour of the young lovers; the end result is general rejoicing.

How do you manage Dvorβk operas when you don't speak Czech? Director Michael McCaffery is something of a veteran, having directed the composer's Bartered Bride in both English and its native language, but he admits it isn't easy.

"The way that I worked on Jakob∅n was to go through the text with a Czech speaker and find which were the key words - which word in which sentence is doing the work," he says. "The great thing about this piece is that Dvorβk has composed it in such a way that he has taken care of all that - it's incredibly articulated within the vocal line all the time. But it does get a bit wearing sometimes when you think, 'OK, let's go from . . .' And you look at the score and there isn't a vowel in sight for two pages. Anyway, I don't have to sing it, so that's the main thing."

Though keen to compose patriotically-flavoured stage works which would be suitable for a Czech national opera, Dvorβk had reservations about the libretto of Jakob∅n, which he thought might be a bit too local for wider consumption in Europe. McCaffery agrees that the story is on the weak side.

"There are a huge number of strands in it, so it's quite hard to weld it all together; also it will take up an idea and won't run with it all the way to the end of the block. The Jir∅/Terinka story, for instance, is wrapped up rather suddenly in a very odd, very casual way. But musically it's a very superior piece. The score is quite glorious - exhilarating and moving at the same time. Jakob∅n may try to be a simple village comedy, but it's given this enormously sophisticated musical language in which to express itself."

McCaffery says his production will aim to avoid folksiness while, at the same time, taking a very stern look at the opera's overt nationalism.

"We wanted to get away from maypoles and ribbons and half-timbered houses. The sort of romantic nationalism that you get in this opera is the sort that was talked about in The Nation and by Speranza - a proud nation shaking off its oppressors and so on. That's very different to the way in which, 120 years later, we regard nationalism - or the kind of nationalism you find in the 21st century slightly to the south and east of Czechoslovakia. When you look at the literature of nationalism in the 19th century you begin to get a very, very strong cult of the exile, so we thought we'd start from there. We felt it was interesting that the two principal characters had this dream of going home to correct everything that had happened to them. When you're an exile you can go home to a place, but you can't go home to a time - you can, in fact, never go back."

Thus the opera's emigres, Bohus and Julie, will look as if they've come from a completely different time and place to the other characters on stage. "They'll look sort of like cabaret performers from about 1910, while the Czech world will be an 18th-century world." The latter will also, palpably, be a world of dreams and of imagination - ultimately, a world of fiction.

Despite the title, Jakob∅n isn't a political opera, says McCaffery; and it is, after all, a comedy. "A lot of incidental comedy comes out of the fact that this pair - who actually want nothing more than to be reinstated as the lord and lady of the manor - are regarded in the village as horrendous revolutionaries, strangers from abroad, Jacob∅ns. Revolution is treated, both as something which is inherently dangerous and untrustworthy, and as a kind of joke."

Happy ever after, though? Not likely. "In the real world, there is no closure. Jakob∅n has a sort of operetta happy ending - but we want to make the audience wonder whether that can really be achieved."