David Agler conducted at the Wexford Festival Opera in 1996, nearly a decade before he took over as artistic director. Were he still on the podium, I ask him, which opera would he choose to conduct at the upcoming 64th festival? “Koanga,” he replies emphatically.
The other two main productions — a return to late 19th-century Italian verismo in Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff, and to French opéra comique in Le Pré aux clercs by Ferdinand Hérold — represent traditional fare for Wexford’s annual exploration of operatic obscurities. Koanga, however, comes from the sometimes-controversial niche with which Agler’s tenure has been associated: English-language opera, 20th century and 21st, British and American. So when he answers “Koanga”, there’s a slightly defiant edge, and a hint of mischief.
Agler feels vindicated about his commitment to its English composer, Frederick Delius (1862-1934), due to the unexpectedly favourable public response to his A Village Romeo and Juliet when it was on the Wexford programme in 2012. “There has been no opera that I have been asked for more than Koanga,” he says. “When people come to my door or stick pieces of paper in my pocket, or ask for this or that, at the top of the list is Koanga.” Is this as a result of the success of A Village Romeo and Juliet? “No, this has been going on for years. Ever since I arrived in Wexford.”
Delius, whose family sent him to Florida in his early twenties so he could develop his business skills running an orange plantation, incorporated Afro-American music into Koanga, which is set in the American south. “The difficulty with Koanga, of course, is how you do an opera cast with a chorus of slaves, and set in the bayous and plantations of Louisiana, in a place like Wexford, where our chorus is entirely white,” Agler says.
“In this day and age it is just not on, from a political point of view, to black-face people. So we have found a symbolic way to show what ‘black’ means, what it means to be a slave, what it means to be taken from your own country. It’ll be interesting to see how people process this. The text is a little naff sometimes, but that’s not the point. In opera, sometimes the words are not the most important thing. It’s what the music can tell us.”
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Despite the ongoing popularity of his well-known Cavalleria Rusticana, Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) never attained the same success with Guglielmo Ratcliff, the opera which was his personal favourite. “The reason it doesn’t get performed is because the tenor part is fiendish,” explains Agler. “So that’s why we’re doing that one.” The tenor is Angelo Villari, an Italian.
Le Pré aux clercs was long on the wish list of festival founder Tom Walsh, but never included. “I had an opportunity to make a co-production with the Opéra Comique in Paris,” says Agler. “This is something new we’re able to do since we’ve had the opera house: work with other opera houses. The other place was just too small.”
The new opera house, which opened in 2008 and replaced the old Theatre Royal, will be part of his legacy. So will the creation of the Wexford Festival Orchestra and the Wexford Festival Chorus, which have almost done away with the need to import players and singers from outside Ireland. “The place is doing well. We enjoy growing audiences again. The press continue to praise us,” he says. “I have the kind of contacts that can bring a lot of stuff to Wexford.”
American-born and now a Canadian citizen, he is resident in Ireland for just two months every year and naturally has strong views on the national state of opera. “It is not good for Wexford for there not to be an opera company in Dublin, because expectations are being put on us which we can never fulfil,” he says. “We are not a company whose mission is to present Irish singers.
“I think it’s strange Dublin is the only European capital of significance without an opera company. Some people use the excuse that there’s not an opera house there, but you can do fine opera in the Gaiety if you have the will to do it. The government talks a lot about opera, but I don’t see the action.”
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The Wexford Opera Festival begins on Wednesday; wexfordopera.com