This year Rosetta Cucchi, Wexford Festival Opera’s Director, conclusively stamped her mark on Ireland’s premiere opera event. Her theme was Women and War. Appointed Artistic Director in 2020, Cucchi was thrown in at the deep end, distracted by the Covid storm, mounting an online festival in 2020, a socially distanced gathering in 2021, then back to a full house 2022.
All good stuff. Heroic, actually. Though Cucchi’s energies were largely devoted to making it happen. That in 2020, in the depths of Covid gloom, she was able to establish Wexford Opera Factory, offering ‘one of the world’s most formative experiences for young opera singers and pianists’, was little short of a miracle.
But this year we experienced full on Cucchi. She directed La ciociara, an Italian opera about WWII-torn Italy, focused on the plight of two Italian women. Mother and daughter. The work is based on the classic 1960 post war Italian film Two Women, from Italian director, Vittorio De Sica – in turn based on the 1957 novel Two Women by Italian author Alberto Moravia – starring Italian actress Sophia Loren. Cucchi had clearly come home, in spades.
Those of you who have not figured that Rosetta Cucchi is Italian, please call 111, the NHS National Helpline – without delay. For those of you who have not figured that the theme of the opera chimed perfectly with the Women and War theme of this year’s festival – I have no hope at all.
Cucchi is only the eighth artistic director in Wexford’s 72-year odyssey. Each is chosen because they bring a special twist to the Wexford offering – re-discovery of rarely performed gems and occasional sorties into modern, unchartered novelty. Hardly surprising that Cucchi is playing to her Italian strengths.
In 1951, founder Dr Thomas Walsh, an anaesthetist at the local hospital (Dr Tom), conceived an opera festival rooted in the local community, making use of the choral talents apparent in Wexford’s churches, of all denominations. Amazingly, I bumped into a charming hospital administrator who had worked with him in the 1960’s. The community spirit of Dr. Tom – he died in 1988 – is very much alive in Wexford.
There is an annual Tom Walsh lecture in his honour. This year it was given by Lara Marlow, a celebrated Irish journalist and war correspondent on Real life Stories of Women in War.
This year the first of the three mainstage operas was Zoraida di Granata, by Gaetano Donizetti, his sixth opera, successful at its 1822 debut in Rome, revived unsuccessfully in a different form in 1824 and then lost to the world.
The opera is set in Granada in 1480, then under Muslim control. Almuzir, a bad king who murdered his predecessor, is in love with Zoraida whose father was also killed in the putsch. The good general, Abenemet, also in love with Zoraida (of course), defends Granada successfully against a Christian Spanish onslaught, but is condemned to death having been tricked into ‘losing’ Granada’s sacred flag.
To save Abenemet Zoraida agrees to marry Almuzir but fails to convince Abenemet that she is going through with the marriage only to save him.
Zoraida is condemned to death because she has been overheard confessing she really loves Abenemet. Unless, that is, a champion can save her. At the last bell – literally – an unknown knight – Unknown? You’re kidding. It’s obviously Abenemet in a big helmet – arrives to champion Zoraida’s cause. Almuzir, watching all this goodness and misunderstanding repents, allowing Abenemet to marry Zoraida. Pure Wexford hokum.
Next up, L’Aube rouge, a drama lyrique by Camille Erlanger, A French composer, debuted in 1911 in Rouen. We should be in early 19th century Russia, at a time of struggle between the established Tsarist regime and rebellious nihilists. Olga, the daughter of a general, is in love with Serge, a nihilist.
In the second scene we jump-cut to the south of France and an arranged wedding. Olga is to marry a French surgeon, Pierre de Ruys – where did that come from? – but eventually runs off with Serge.
Olga teams up with the nihilists and when Serge is shot in a squabble, who saves him? After some pleading from Olga, Dr Pierre de Ruys.
Serge, his name tragically drawn by lot by Olga, is sent off by the nihilists with a bomb to assassinate Le Grand Duc Grégorieff, who happens to be in town. There is an impressive flash of red light – L’Aube rouge – Olga knows that Serge is dead and drops dead in madness.
Ella Marchment, the director, screwed up. The timeline was baffling. The wounded Serge is wheeled in for his consultation with Dr de Ruys in a supermarket trolley, straight from the carpark of the local Dunnes.
Costumes were not in period. Any period. Were we in the early 19th century, the disorders of the early 1900s, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the present day?
Marchment, a British director, now an Associate Professor at Shenandoah University, would probably argue that she was creating a L’Aube rouge for all ages. I think it was just confusing and would have been better focused on the single period in Russian history in which it was originally set.
The staging featured metal staircases leading to nowhere, used pointlessly for posed arias. They were reconfigured for each scene and completely distracting.
Erlanger’s music was compelling, written through with no set piece arias. The opera opens evocatively, and Olga’s expressions of love are truly beautiful, although mostly delivered from atop that pointless staircase. Erlanger deserves further exploration. Almost none of his opus has been recorded.
And then there was the triumphant La ciociara. An opera composed in 2015 by Marco Tutino and first performed by San Francisco Opera. Libretto by Fabio Ceresa and Luca Rossi, this proved an excellent collaboration.
There were no punches pulled. Pure wartime tragedy, viewed through the lens of a mother and daughter relationship. The destruction of innocence when Cesira’s daughter, Rosetta, was raped by liberating Moroccan troops was harrowing. Her following transformation into a slutty libertine, propositioning every swain in the village, traumatising.
The ultimate reconciliation of mother and daughter in a closing duet, encapsulated in Cesira’s discovery of a surprise, late blooming flower, an emblem of hope, was breathtakingly beautiful. No false promises. Life will never be perfect. But, even tainted by harrowing loss and bitter experience, we are left to understand our heroines will go on as best they can. It is the resolution of the two women that will ultimately prevail.
Tutino, delivered a lyrical, filmic score, matching perfectly the evocation of the film version of the story. The close relationship of the art forms was underpinned by the silent, permanent presence, sitting slightly offstage right in a director’s chair – it had his name emblazoned on it, so no uncertainty – of film director Vittorio Di Sica.
Silver haired, black wide brimmed hat, elegant suit, coat draped over the shoulders, thick black-frame glasses, Di Sica was 1960’s Alitalia chic personified. ‘Stewardess, more caviar and champagne for Miss Loren!’
In post opera chat some found him an intrusion, but I thought he literally framed the action. In the opera we were seeing into his mind as the action unfolded and the characters evolved. He would occasionally reach out, visibly moved. Before the curtain fell there was a moment when he was tempted to leave, but finally felt compelled to stay.
The end. Di Sica walked slowly centre stage and turned to the audience. The scene dissolved into a sound stage with lights and all the paraphernalia of the film studio. We had been watching the making of his film, pepped up by the operatic art form.
The opera opens in Rome, in the middle of WWII. Widowed shopkeeper, Cesira is shutting up shop and is forced to sleep with Giovanni, a back marketeer who supplies her vegetables. In exchange, Giovanni will arrange passage to safety in Ciociara, the mountain village where Cesira was born. She will be taking her daughter, Rosetta, home.
But in Ciociara Cesira finds only rejection. Too many refugees. She is befriended by a bookish itinerant, Michele, who becomes her lover. Rosetta’s relationship with Michele is equivocal. Father figure or potential lover?
A wounded American airman, John Buckley, is rescued by Cesira and Michele and gives them his watch and a letter home to be sent if he does not return.
There follows a scene in the home of a lawyer, Pasquale Sciortino, who is meant to help Cesira. Sciortino is a comical ‘Mama’s’ boy, obeying Una Donna’s every instruction and having his hair perpetually combed. The Sciortinis are billeting a Nazi Major, Fedor von Bock. Giovanni is in cahoots with von Bock and eventually reveals Michele as guilty of assisting the enemy, Buckley.
This scene of domestic horror harbours the only comic moment of the piece. Mama Sciortino, oblivious to the tragedy unfolding in her dining room, keeps offering everyone chestnut soup. She has decided that the best way to cope with conflict is to ignore it.
It is announced the Allies have landed at Anzio. Oops! Von Bock makes his excuses and leaves. Giovanni executes Michele and Cesira and Rosetta are raped by liberating Moroccan troops.
Rosetta, transformed by the assault into a local vamp, breaks with her mother, but Buckley reappears, reveals that Giovanni has stolen his letter and watch from Michele who is dead and eventually mother and daughter are reconciled. Giovanni has his well-deserved comeuppance.
The voices were superb. The women centre stage were standouts. Israeli mezzo soprano, Na’ama Goldman, acted her heart out as Cesira. Naturally gaunt, she epitomised a hard-working wartime mother, celebrating when a happenstance onion was found.
Jade Phoenix, an Irish soprano sang Rosetta. Phoenix participated in the Wexford Opera Factory and has now graduated to mainstage. One of her contemporaries, soprano Kathleen Norchi, is based in Manhattan. She was Phoenix’s ‘roomie’ at Wexford, now has engagements in the US, and was not at all surprised she had been fingered for the role by Cucchi. Ample proof that the concept of encouraging fresh talent is paying off.
Wexford always surprises. The purple clad soprano in a big purple hat singing Carmen arias from the first-floor window of Barkers High Street store at noon on Saturday was only one. Over the festival pop-up events exploded unexpectedly around the town.
The programme for the 2024 Wexford Festival Opera has been announced. Centering on the theme of Theatre within Theatre, the three mainstage operas have been revealed as Le Maschere by Pietro Mascagni,1901; The Critic by Charles Villiers Stanford, 1916; and Le convenienze e inconvenienze teatrali by Gaetano Donizetti, 1827.
This is lighter fare than this year’s Women and War, which was a sadly prescient Cucchi choice. Eighty events over a 16-day festival make Wexford a must – again – for 2024. Why not? I’ve been going since 1978.
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