seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Benjamin Britten


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The Founding of the Wexford Festival Opera

Wexford Festival Opera (Irish: Féile Ceoldráma Loch Garman), an opera festival that takes place in the town of Wexford in southeastern Ireland, first takes place on October 21, 1951.

Tom Walsh, an avid opera lover, dreamed of staging an opera production in his hometown Wexford. He starts the Wexford Opera Study Circle in 1950, and invites Sir Compton Mackenzie, the founder of the magazine Gramophone and a writer on music, for the inaugural lecture for the circle. Mackenzie and Walsh discuss the idea of a local opera festival, and Mackenzie becomes the first President of the Wexford Festival of Music and the Arts.

The result is that a group of opera lovers, including Dr. Tom Walsh who becomes the festival’s first artistic director, plan a “Festival of Music and the Arts” (as the event is first called) from October 21 to November 4, 1951. The highlight is a production of the 19th century Irish composer Michael William Balfe‘s 1857 The Rose of Castille, a little-known opera whose composer had lived in Wexford.

Setting itself aside from the well-known operas during its early years places Wexford in a unique position in the growing world of opera festivals, and this move is supported by well-known critics such as the influential Desmond Shawe-Taylor of The Sunday Times, who communicates what is happening each autumn season.

During its first decade, Wexford offers an increasingly enthusiastic and knowledgeable audience such rarities as Albert Lortzing‘s Der Wildschütz and obscure works (for the time) such as Vincenzo Bellini‘s La sonnambula is staged, with Marilyn Cotlow as Adina and Nicola Monti as Elvino. Bryan Balkwill, Charles Mackerras and John Pritchard are among the young conductors, working with subsequently famous producers and designers like Micheál Mac Liammóir. For the time, the results are astounding, and the festival is soon attracting leading operatic talent, both new and established.

Albert Rosen, a young conductor from Prague, begins a long association with the company in 1965, and he goes on to conduct eighteen Wexford productions. He is later appointed Principal Conductor of the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra and is Conductor Laureate at the time of his death in 1997.

In 1967, Walter Legge, the EMI recording producer and founder of the Philharmonia Orchestra is asked to take over the running of the festival, but within a month of the appointment he suffers a severe heart attack and is obliged to withdraw. The 26-year-old former Trinity College Dublin (TCD) student Brian Dickie takes over the running of the Festival. A new era of outstanding singing emerges, with the first operas in Russian and Czech plus a new emphasis on the French repertory as represented by Léo Delibes’ Lakmé in 1970 and Georges Bizet‘s Les pêcheurs de perles in 1971.

Dickie is persuaded to return to Glyndebourne, but his successor in 1974 is Thomson Smillie who comes from the Scottish Opera. In 1976, Benjamin Britten‘s The Turn of the Screw is presented along with a rarity in Domenico Cimarosa‘s one-man piece Il maestro di cappella. Other rare Italian operas of the 18th century are presented in 1979 and subsequent years.

In subsequent years the festival is run by Adrian Slack (1979-81), Elaine Padmore (1982-94), Luigi Ferrari (1995-2004), David Agler (2005-19) and Rosetta Cucchi (2020-present).

The festival’s home of so many years, the Theatre Royal, is demolished and replaced by the Wexford Opera House on the same site. The opera house is officially opened on September 5, 2008, in a ceremony with the Taoiseach Brian Cowen, followed by a live broadcast of RTÉ‘s The Late Late Show from the O’Reilly Theatre. The first opera in the new building opens on October 16, 2008. Wexford Opera House provides the festival with a modern venue with a 35% increase in capacity by creating the 771-seat O’Reilly Theatre and a second, highly flexible Jerome Hynes Theatre, with a seating capacity up to 176. The architect is Keith Williams with the Office of Public Works. The acoustics and structure are designed by Arup.

In 2006, because of the closure of the Theatre Royal, a reduced festival takes place in the Dún Mhuire Hall on Wexford’s South Main Street. Only two operas are staged over a period of two weeks, instead of the usual three operas over three weeks. In 2007, the festival takes place in the summer in a temporary theatre on the grounds of Johnstown Castle, a stately home roughly 5 km from the town centre.

The building is officially renamed as Ireland’s National Opera House by the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Heather Humphreys, at the opening of the 2014 Wexford Festival.


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Birth of Louis MacNeice, Poet & Playwright

louis-macneice

Louis MacNeice, British poet and playwright, is born in Belfast on September 12, 1907. He is a member, along with Wystan Hugh Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Stephen Spender, of a group whose low-keyed, unpoetic, socially committed, and topical verse is the “new poetry” of the 1930s. His body of work is widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style.

MacNeice is the youngest son of John Frederick MacNeice and Elizabeth Margaret (“Lily”) MacNeice. His father, a Protestant minister, goes go on to become a bishop of the Anglican Church of Ireland. The family moves to Carrickfergus, County Antrim, soon after MacNeice’s birth. His mother dies of tuberculosis in December 1914. In 1917, his father remarries to Georgina Greer and his sister Elizabeth is sent to board at a preparatory school at Sherborne, England. MacNeice joins her at Sherborne Preparatory School later in the year.

After studying at the University of Oxford (1926–30), MacNeice becomes a lecturer in classics at the University of Birmingham (1930–36) and later in the Department of Greek at the Bedford College for Women, London (1936–40). In 1941 he begins to write and produce radio plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Foremost among his fine radio verse plays is the dramatic fantasy The Dark Tower (1947), with music by Benjamin Britten.

MacNeice’s first book of poetry, Blind Fireworks, appears in 1929, followed by more than a dozen other volumes, such as Poems (1935), Autumn Journal (1939), Collected Poems, 1925–1948 (1949), and, posthumously, The Burning Perch (1963). An intellectual honesty, Celtic exuberance, and sardonic humour characterize his poetry, which combines a charming natural lyricism with the mundane patterns of colloquial speech. His most characteristic mood is that of the slightly detached, wryly observant, ironic and witty commentator. Among MacNeice’s prose works are Letters from Iceland (with W.H. Auden, 1937) and The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941). He is also a skilled translator, particularly of Horace and Aeschylus (The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, 1936).

By the early 1960s, MacNeice is “living on alcohol,” and eating very little, but still writing. In August 1963 he goes caving in Yorkshire to gather sound effects for his final radio play, Persons from Porlock. Caught in a storm on the moors, he does not change out of his wet clothes until he is home in Hertfordshire. Bronchitis evolves into viral pneumonia and he is admitted to hospital in London on August, 27. He dies there on September 3, 1963 at the age of 55. He is buried in Carrowdore churchyard in County Down, alongside his mother.

MacNeice’s final book of poems, The Burning Perch, is published a few days after his funeral. His life-long friend from Oxford, W.H. Auden, who gives a reading at MacNeice’s memorial service, describes the poems of his last two years as “among his very best.”