Cold War America, Transformations was a Freudian journey into the heart of darkness. It was, as they say, the talk of the town, which, incidentally, was becoming awash with composers and librettists in the flesh: Carlisle Floyd, Conrad Susa, John Corigliano and William M Hoffman (The Ghost of Versailles), Donald Sturrock and Peter Ash (The Golden Ticket) and Richard Wargo (Winners). What also defines Agler as an artistic director, aside from the courage to mount epic productions – Rusalka at Johnstown Castle and The Golden Ticket at Wexford Opera House – is his intuitive skill in coalescing the diverse talent that an art form as multifarious as opera requires, especially with the ShortWorks.
And Agler continues to keep Wexford on its toes by slipping in the unfamiliar: Winners by Richard Wargo, La Voix humaine by Francis Poulenc, A Dinner Engagement by Lennox Berkeley, The Old Maid and the Thief by Menotti and a sumptuous Suor Angelica by Puccini. This year’s The Sleeping Queen by Balfe is the first staged production in Ireland in living memory, and Wargo returns with Losers. Wexford cannot avail of the concession of familiarity to engage an audience from the outset: there is not a hummable line in Transformations or Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, thus Wexford must take a longer, orbital path toward developing some common ground between the performers and the audience. One doesn’t judge a mosaic by the hue of a single pebble. Perhaps all true art is in the invisible, but Wexford’s ability to extract a narrative from the weft of the implausible and the incredible is its raison d’être, whether with the old or the new.
photo © derek speirs
For Le Tragédie de Carmen, Agler needed a contemporary version of a young Peter Brook to realise his vision of opera within a play, and brought on board Andrew Steggall, garlanded for his direction of Over Gardens Out by Peter Gill. Once word of mouth – the Gospel in Wexford – spread after the premiere, not a seat was to be found for the remaining five performances.
The Golden Ticket by Peter Ash & Donald Sturrock, Wexford Festival Opera 2010
Artistic directors like Elaine Padmore, Luigi Ferrari and David Agler have ensured that while opera works by illusion, the pleasure derived is far from illusory.
Tom Mooney, author of All the Bishops’ Men (Collins Press), is Editor of the Wexford Echo Group of Newspapers. His latest book, Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams, is published in November.
All art is in the invisible
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