Shakespeare on crack at the Wexford Festival Opera this October

Much ado about Shakespeare – that just about sums up the Wexford Festival Opera 2020 programme. Huzzah! General Booking, that omnipresent stalwart of opera festivals, has bestirred himself, declared the box office open, and this writer has already secured plum seats for Wexford’s three main stage operas.

This year, the festival (held on Ireland’s eastern coast, 20 October–1 November) is following a Shakespeare theme. Incoming Italian artistic director, Rosetta Cucchi, is strongly of the view that Shakespeare’s themes of love, madness and comedy are operatic. Good excuse for a theme. Job done. Let’s all head to the pub.

Except that one of the productions, Edmea by Alfredo Catalani, has nothing to do with Shakespeare at all. Very Wexford. The other two do – well… a bit. They are Ein Wintermärchen (composer Karl Goldmark), and Le Songe d’une nuit éte (composer Amboise Thomas).

Ms Cucchi, in a Radio Telefis Eirann (RTE) interview with show host Marty Whelan from locked-down Pesaro in Italy, is unapologetic about playing fast and loose with the Bard. “Well, Edmea is like Shakespeare”. Fair enough.

The 25-minute interview on the prime-time Marty in the Morning RTE show is a hoot. Following what turned into a Ms Cucchi torrential triumph, the show is set to be renamed Marty Gets a Word in Edgeways… Sometimes. The interview is here, and the bit readers want is 2 hours 37 minutes in. (This guidance, gained at some personal cost to the writer, should not be ignored).

Something else to mark Ms Cucchi’s debut: Wexford Factory is a pioneering two-week academy in September for a dozen young Irish or Irish-based singers, a strategy for encouraging home-grown talent.

She has also persuaded her friend, American soprano Lisette Oropesa (a longstanding Metropolitan Opera favourite, this season title roles in Manon and La Traviata) to appear in concert. There is to be a post-performance cabaret. It cannot hope to match the 1970s late-night, illegal Smoked Products and Oyster Bar pop-up shebeen in a backstreet courtyard, hosted by a lady who drove back and forth to Galway for the fresh oysters every day, but it promises to be a step in the right direction.

In Le songe d’une nuit éte, anyone expecting to see Oberon and Titania won’t. The Amboise opera has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Instead, it is a romp featuring Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I.

Joseph-Bernard Rosier and Adolphe de Leuven, the librettists, portray the playwright-poet sinking gradually into drunkenness and debauchery – perhaps lockdown syndrome – until Elizabeth bucks him up. He’s England’s literary genius (“Il faut respecter le genie qui pour toi descendit du ciel”). Note: This is not what Elizabeth II said to President Trump at Buck House. It is, though, what the President thought she said.

Then the plot heads for really bizzaro territory. Third leading character is Sir John Falstaff, governor of “Richemont”, where the action is set. Oh, come on, he’s only a couple of centuries out of period. The lady-in-waiting, Olivia (wrong play), is courted by Lord Latimer, but nearly loses him when Shakespeare accidentally embraces her and then has to fight the young peer. This is Shakespeare on crack.

Surprise, surprise, Le Songe is an opera comique. Amboise and his librettists are good at this genre. He was highly popular at Paris’ Opera-Comique in the mid 1800s. Another of his operas, La Coeur Célimène, was successfully revived at Wexford in 2011.

Walter Le Moli, the stage director, has produced Shakespeare theatre – aha, at last, a spooky Shakespeare connection at a distance. In opera, he has staged Verdi´s Don Carlo at Naples’ Teatro San Carlo; Janacek’s Jenufa with Vladimir Jurowski; Mozart’s Così fan tutte; Puccini’s Il trittico with Gianandrea Noseda at the Mariinsky Theatre; Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunnaire at Parma’s Teatro Due; and Peter Weiss’s Marat-Sade, which was performed by Fabio Biondi and his orchestra, Europa Galante, in Rome, Parma and Turin. Quite a CV. He has comprehensive experience of genres ranging from tragedy to comedy, and is a catch for Wexford.

Edmea really has nothing to do with Shakespeare at all. I have looked. Dug deep. Nix. Readers who know of a connection, please advise. The libretto is a bit of a mongrel. Tracing its origins is a “Whatever happened to Alexandre Dumas (fils)” whodunnit. Department of explanation: Dumas – fils, remember – wrote La Dame aux Camélias which served as the plot for Verdi’s La Traviata. He regularly provided fertile ground for opera plots. Of course, you knew that.

Hoping to capitalise on the Verdi triumph, Catalani dug up another Dumas work, Les Danicheff, and had the brass neck to approach Verdi’s librettist, Arrigo Boito, asking him to turn it into an opera. Boito told him to push off. Undeterred, Catalani turned to Antonio Ghislanzoni, librettist of Verdi’s wildly successful Aida.

He had an offhand “here’s one I prepared earlier” moment, pulling off the shelf a libretto written for someone else and discarded, based on something completely different. There’s artistic integrity for you. Blowing off the dust, the pair squeezed the Les Danicheff plot into the libretto, ending up with a highly original plot about a young woman, mad with love, forced to marry against her will. Well, never heard that one before. There is a mad scene and a happy ending. Sorry, spoiler.

In the hands of director, Julia Burbach, I think Edmea will turn out to be this year’s Wexford Surprise. Ms Burbach has great skill in opera alchemy. She is staff director at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where she was responsible for the recent revival of the Richard Jones La Bohème, eliminating many of the original 2017 production’s disappointing glitches. She ranges far and wide, including delivering highly successful work for the niche Grimeborne (yes, that is an intentional riff on Glyndebourne) opera company, who stage cutting-edge productions in London’s east end.

“What about that Shakespeare guy?” (Ed.) Sorry, nearly forgot. Karl Goldmark’s Ein Wintermärchen (A Winter’s Tale) lands, at last, firmly on the festival’s theme. Premiered at the Hofoper in Vienna in 1908, Ein Wintermärchen was the last of six operas composed by Goldmark (1830–1915). His first opera is his most famous, Die Köningen von Saba (The Queen of Sheba).

Goldmark’s greatest strength is as a magician of orchestration. Contemporary critics enthused about the “burning scarlet gleam” and “sensuous iridescence” of his music. Must be good then. The librettist of Ein Wintermärchen is Alfred Maria Willner, one of the most prolific Viennese wordsmiths of the day, producing over fifty libretti, including several for Franz Lehár.

Dmitry Bertman has been chosen to direct. The Russian theatre and opera director is the founder of Helikon Opera, Moscow, based in the 250 seat Mayakovsky Theatre, formerly the ballroom in the palace of the Shakhoskoi-Glebov-Streshneva family – great 19th century arts patrons. He is a master of cutting-edge production.

Away from the main stage there are other Shakespeare-flavoured delights on offer. Shakespeare in Love: a collage of the most famous love scenes, arias, duets and quartets from operas related to Shakespeare. The Dark Side of Shakespeare: another collage, this time of the darker, more obscure and mysterious Shakespearean characters in opera, from Otello to Macbeth.

Then there is Shakespeare and Falstaff in Conversation. Set in O’Flaherty’s Bar/Undertaker Saloon, it’s a pop-up event that will thrill with spontaneity, intellectual perspicacity, and heroic Guinness consumption. I am working on the libretto. Watch this space.

Wexford Festival Opera, plying its eccentric wares since 1951, thrives on innovation. To its illogical revivals it brings a freshness of approach, bringing neglected works to life. Pulling off that trick year on year takes cunning. I think Ms Cucchi’s bold, first, festival should be themed Three Directors of Wexford. Walter Le Moli, Julia Burbach and Dmitry Bertman are smart choices for an opera company that self-styles as a Hidden Gem. They have been recruited to the colours for a purpose. I bet the trio, with Rosetta Cucchi’s fresh eye, will burnish the lunatic element that makes Wexford such a standout festival in the opera calendar.