Going solo in Ireland

Wexford’s remarkable opera house is as good a symbol as any of the Irish financial meltdown. The auditorium is fabulous, and not just acoustically. The building — funded by the Irish government just before the banks collapsed — is now the trump card that has preserved the Wexford Festival as Ireland’s sole surviving operatic gesture. There was a brief fantasy moment when a previous culture minister talked about creating an Irish national company in Dublin, and the Arts Council of Ireland said it would provide over €5 million for the artform. But dream on. Instead, Opera Ireland has been wound up and Opera Theatre Company reduced to a shadow.

Wexford is the wrong place to have built Ireland’s only opera house. But this unusual festival devoted to operas that never flew and probably never will is an established international fixture that this year attracted fewer critics from Britain than from the world’s opera factory, Germany. And there is much to celebrate.

David Agler, the festival’s American artistic director (whose tenure will likely be extended next year till 2017), has at last brought back a locally engaged chorus — instead of buying in the choral services from Prague — and has also pulled together a mostly Irish freelance festival orchestra: Agler is a conductor. These two decisions make total sense in a country where there are very few jobs for musicians, and at Wexford where taxpayers’ money has been and is crucial. How many Irish businesses have spare cash for sponsorship of things artistic? Even in the US, where taxpayers have long subsidised the generosity of the rich with tax kickbacks, opera — if any survives — may in future follow the German example of substantial public funding as with pre-university education, many museums, libraries, the US Post.