If, as Andrew Clark wrote in The Financial Times in 2013, the Wexford Festival was ‘a cradle of surprises in an age bringing metropolitan operatic companies into an ever closer hug of generic co-productions’, how prescient of Wexford a decade earlier to have chosen for the first time an Artistic Director from the ranks of musicians and conductors to spearhead a new reign for a new opera house in a new millennium.
From Vancouver, David
Agler was not an unknown quantity to the Festival Board when he was appointed
its seventh Artistic Director. His predecessor, Luigi Ferrari, had invited
David to conduct Zdeněk
Fibich’s Šárka
(whose répétiteur was Rosetta Cucchi) in the Theatre
Royal in 1996, the same season as conductors Maurizio Benini and a
very young Vladimir Jurowski. David was by then a formidable champion of 20th
century opera – Leoš Janáček’s Jenufa,
Alban Berg’s Wozzeck,
Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues
des Carmélite – and had conducted the American premiere of Sir Michael
Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage.
The Wexford Festival which David
joined as Artistic Director in 2005 was on the cusp of wholescale change: a
gaping void left by the untimely death of its CEO, Jerome Hynes, on David’s
first official day in the role; the departure after a decade of Luigi Ferrari
and the demolition of the much loved but no longer fit for purpose Theatre
Royal, the Festival’s home since 1951, whose stage was unerringly described by
Joyce Kennedy as ‘the size of a pocket handkerchief.’ The new Artistic Director
was faced with the daunting challenge of programming four seasons of opera from
2005 to 2008 in multiple venues – two of which did not yet exist – while
embracing the widening artistic goals and aspirations of the Board: in the
words of Chairman Paul Hennessy, ‘a time to redefine Wexford Festival Opera in
terms of its artistic ambitions.’ And finding this different perspective, while
adhering to the Festival’s raison d’être, searching for seams that struggle to
produce gold, is what David sought. But change did not drag its heels. No
sooner had the lights dimmed on the last opera at the Theatre Royal, Susannah,
than the diggers and the wrecking ball arrived at the High Street site.
As the last Artistic Director of the Theatre Royal and the first at
Wexford Opera House, David’s programming was instrumental in seguing the old
and the new, the past and the future. He achieved this by choosing a relatively
contemporary opera, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah,
to bring the curtain down on the Theatre Royal. Susannah was a quantum leap, being only the third opera by a living
composer performed at Wexford (Albert
Herring in 1970 and The Turn of the
Shrew in 1976 by Benjamin Britten and Of
Mice and Men, also by Floyd, in 1980). Susannah
railed against bigotry, intolerance and religious fundamentalism, light
years in theme from the Ottocento fare of the common Wexford repertoire. For a
Festival without a roof over its head, the choice of a 20th century
opera was an apobaterion: a valedictory tipping of the hat to an era past and a
votive for a safe landing.
The long running Opera Scenes – condensed versions of
masterworks with piano accompaniment – became ShortWorks and the repertoire was
expanded. Opera derives its life force from disparate elements, but the
ShortWorks, such as Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium in 2005, reminded us that
opera essentially is a sung stage drama set to continuous music and not a play
with the appendage of music or a concert with the appendage of a play. David’s sundering of
the Festival from its comfort zone of predominantly nineteenth century European
opera was unflagging in 2006 with his repertoire for the substitute venue of
the Dun Mhuire, the old parish hall. Joe Vaněk,
who designed a quartet of operas at Wexford from 1987 to 1989, was tasked with
creating a pit and a stage to accommodate a nine piece orchestra and an eight
strong cast for Conrad Susa’s chamber opera, Transformations. It was by far the youngest work ever shown at the
Festival, having premiered at the Cedar Village Theater in Minneapolis,
Minnesota in 1973, but regarded by Susa as more entertainment in two acts and
less pure opera. Wexford had never seen anything quite like Transformations, a modern opera by a
living composer not overly concerned with finding common ground with its
audience. But itwas never less than scintillating,
assisted brilliantly by Fiona McAndrew in the role of the poet Anne Sexton, and
the playing of the new Orchestra
of the Wexford Festival Opera, an innovation by David.
For David’s next herculean
task, concocting a theatre out of thin air for the 2007 Festival, time was in
short supply. Two years earlier, Jerome Hynes and Vaněk had reconnoitered the pastoral elegance of Johnstown
Castle in the ancient barony of Forth as a host for the 56th Festival, which
was then brought forward from the written-in-stone autumnal berth to June. With
an impossibly short lead in, promotion of the summer Festival was in full swing
even before the 2006 event had started.
It
was, as Paul Hennessy noted in the programme, a strange feeling to have the
light of early summer pouring through his window for the start of the 2007
season. David planned his second festival outside normal facilities for the
custom built (and temporary) Johnstown Theatre, on the front lawn of Johnstown
Castle, transmogrified wondrously by Vaněk
and Paraic Boran to accommodate a full seventeen day programme of opera. Once
again, David was breaking new ground. Rusalka, conducted by Dmitri
Jurowski, was no Wexford rarity, but a production of a mainstream opera at a
scale unheard of in Ireland. If you build it, they will come, a voice tells the
character Ray Kinsella in the film Field of Dreams, and 20,000 would
come to Wexford from near and far.
The opening scene in Rusalka
of water nymphs frolicking in the moonlight was in synch with the Arcadia of
Johnstown Castle, offering its own reflecting pool and crenellated moonlight as
Helena
Kaupová confessed her guilty secret in
the famous aria in the first act. The Festival was a feast of the imagination,
comprising a ballet with song in one act (Pulcinella), a theatrical
caprice in another (Arlecchino, often staged with the lesser known Turandot
by Busoni, which was part of the Wexford repertoire in 1988) and a play with
music in three acts (Der Silbersee).
The surprise critical tour
de force that summer, however, and later nominated for Best Opera Production in
the Irish Times Theatre Awards, was to be found in Wexford town: the not so
short (an hour and a half) apogee of the three ShortWorks, Peter Brook’s La
Tragedie de Carmen at the Dun Mhuire. Pared further by the 24-year-old directing wunderkind, Andrew Steggall,
this was a Carmen of creative
ingenuity. Incidentally, Wexford’s previous shot at Carmen was in the cavernous White’s Barn in 1998, with an unknown
20-year-old Maltese tenor, Joseph Calleja, as Don Jose, already capable of
vocally beating an egg white into a cube of froth.
Simultaneously, a new
opera house was rising upon the footprint of the old, and would dominate the
skyline of Wexford in a way the Victorian theatre never did. And so, on October
16, 2008, when the curtain rose on Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snegurochka, Ireland’s first acoustically purpose-built Opera
House, delivered on budget and on time – €33m, modest in
comparison with the new opera house in Copenhagen (€239m) – was the
undoubted star of the 57th Wexford Festival. Its achievement of
scale was rooted in an architectural contradiction: though three and a half
times the capacity of the Theatre Royal (769 seats, increasing
to 853 if the orchestra pit is not in use and 40 fly bars for scenery changes
for six cycles of three operas) and topped externally by a fly tower clad in
copper, the new opera house remained, ingeniously, a hidden gem on High Street.
From that moment on, David would take full advantage of the new venue’s
capacious stage to bring ambitious works – John Corigliano’s The Ghost of Versailles, Roman
Statkowski’s Maria, Frederick
Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet and
Koanga – to Wexford. Nor would he
hold the 21st century at arm’s length: hot off the press came Peter
Ash’s The Golden Ticket, one of many
co-productions: Dinner At Eight with
Minnesota Opera; Le pré aux clercs with Opéra Comique and Palazzetto Bru Zane and Medea with Opera Omaha. Six years after it
opened, Wexford Opera House was officially renamed
Ireland’s National Opera House.
Though fluctuating economic realities would affect Wexford
– with rigorous cost cutting and a shortened season in 2009 – David did his
best to ensure, as the Festival turned sixty, that it would evolve through
exciting and challenging repertoires. The discovery too of new voices, for
which Wexford is celebrated (Juan Diego Flórez – a student of David’s at the
Curtis Institute – in Giacomo Meyerbeer‘s
L’étoile du nord and Joseph Calleja in I Cavalieri de
Ekebu), continued unabated. Twenty years after Karen Notare in Zaza and
ten years after Lada Biriucov and Ermonela Jaho in Orleanskaya deva, the dynamic Angela Meade made her European
debut as the eponymous heroine in Saverio Mercadante’s Virginia, a
production which won the Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Opera. Meade exemplified what David believes to be
the cornerstone of opera – the sound and purity of the voice.
The irrepressible
Australian soprano Helena Dix was the star turn when Wexford struck gold in
2013 with a polished gem from outside the mainstream, Cristina, regina de Svezia, by Jacopo Foroni. 2013 was a stellar
Festival, featuring as it did an imaginatively fertile Massenet double bill, Thérèse and La Navarraise, with the made to measure
Nora Sourouzian, playing the part of the heroine in both. Wexford was nominated
in several categories at that year’s International Opera Awards, including Best
Festival, Best Chorus and Best Young Singer (Dix). It won Best Re-discovered
Work for Cristina, regina de
Svezi.
In the twilight of
David’s years as Artistic Director, Wexford Festival Opera won in the 2017 Best
Festival category at the International Opera awards on the back of a season
which included a sumptuous Vanessa. A
Samuel Barber-Menotti masterpiece, it had drifted into the musical wilderness
and was rescued by Wexford. David’s continual forays into the Irish literary canon
in the ShortWorks has brought us memorable productions: Winners and Losers,
adapted by composer Richard Wargo from Brian Friel’s Lovers; The Sleeping Queen, composed by Wexford’s
Michael William Balfe and Ralph
Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea,
inspired by the J.M. Synge play. In 2017, the Festival presented the world
premiere of Dubliners by Andrew Synnott, two short operas based on the
stories Counterparts and The Boarding House from Dubliners
by James Joyce – a season
in which the recitals also featured the Thomas
Moore Songbook with Una Hunt.
There is too a distinctly Irish flavour to this year’s programme on the
stage of the National Opera House with the premiere of Andrew’s La cucina, and a concert version of The Veiled Prophet by the Irish composer
Charles Villers Stanford, based on a popular romance by the aforementioned
Moore, whose mother was born in Wexford. David has stayed loyal to the central tenet of each Artistic Director’s
brief: to bring rare operatic gems back to life. He has continued Wexford’s
love affair with bel canto and with Donizetti – five operas in as many years – along
with Massenet and Mercadante. He has, however, cast his net wide since he
opened his account in 2005 with Donizetti’s Maria
de Rohan: works by over thirty composers have graced the stage of the
National Opera House in twelve seasons. Never afraid to speak his mind or lay
an opinion on the line, David’s acuity for what is or isn’t a right fit for
Wexford is fortified by a razor sharp acumen. A key to his longevity – he has
conducted over a hundred operas – is that he enjoys working within a creative
community and, through a combination of unity of purpose and visionary
leadership, getting the best from his artists. Aside from his intuitive
detection of raw talent – he gave Lise Davidsen the principal role in Medea after hearing her at the Belvedere
Singing Competition in Amsterdam in 2015 – he could foresee the zeitgeist
before we, his audience, knew it was upon us.
As a national and
international cultural institution, David felt the Festival had a role to play
in the centenary commemorations of the Great War, a conflict which claimed the
lives of close to a thousand Wexford men, including the forty or so who died in
a single day on October 19, 1914. A century later, on October 24, 2014, Wexford
staged the European premiere of Silent
Night, by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell,
the first opera in the history of the festival in which one could have heard a
pin drop at the ebbing of the final scene. But as the poppies snowed sepulchral
upon an elderly veteran standing before a war memorial, this most poignant of
tableaux gave way to sustained applause. The Irish collective memory had
discarded the war, and David knew this. Taking the road less travelled and
earmarking Silent Night for the 2014
repertoire was a singular act of bravery by the Wexford Festival, and it would
chime perfectly with the spirit of commemorations in Ireland and further
afield, then and in the years to follow.
The production of Silent Night
epitomised the universality of Wexford: an opera in
English translated by Americans from a French screenplay, directed by an
Israeli and including a strong Irish contingent in the cast. Finally, the Wexford Festival, which by a
photosynthesis of its locus, its history and performing talent, always
coinciding with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, is one of international
opera’s great cultural powerhouses: David has played no small part in helping
to make it so. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.
