The Wexford Touch

Derek Speirs Iveta Jiříková in the title role of Josef Bohuslav Foerster’s Eva at the Wexford Festival Opera, 2004 Among all the music and opera festivals of Europe, Salzburg might be the grandest, or it certainly thinks it is; the Schwarzenberg Schubertiade is the prettiest, with Schubert played and sung amid the lovely hills of the Bregenzerwald overlooking the upper Rhine; and Bayreuth is without doubt the most grueling. Richard Wagner characteristically decreed that the audience must suffer for his art, and spend sixteen hours listening to the Ring while seated on acutely uncomfortable wooden benches.But the Wexford Festival Opera, which marks its seventy-fifth anniversary later this month, is surely the unlikeliest: an annual gathering founded by local enthusiasts in a small town in the southeast corner of an Ireland that was then far from prosperous. Since my first visit in 1969 I’ve become very fond not only of the festival but of the place. Wexford has around 20,000 inhabitants, a handsome front on the estuary of the River Slaney, two huge Victorian Catholic churches and a modest Georgian protestant church, and a fascinating history, much of it somber.The Romans never conqu...