Sisters are doing it for themselves: Wexford Festival Opera's focus in 2027 will be women as creators with operas by Carolina Uccelli, Smetana & Saint-Saëns'

Wexford Festival Opera has announced its 2027 programme. Artistic director Rosetta Cucchi's theme for next year is a tribute to the extraordinary courage, resilience and creative power of women. The three main stage operas will be Carolina Uccelli's Anna di Resburgo, Smetana's Tajemství (The Secret) and Saint-Saëns' Déjanire. An Italian, a Czech and a French composer; a woman composer, a woman librettist and a powerful woman protagonist. Three leading female roles will all be performed by Wexford Factory alumni.

Lucien Muratore as Hercule in
Déjanire by Camille Saint-Saëns

Saint-Saëns' Déjanire had a rather intriguing history, linking to a play by a distinguished French opera librettist. Louis Gallet (1835-1898) was a French writer whose librettos included Djamileh for Bizet, La princesse jaune and several others for Saint-Saens, Le roi de Lahore, Le Cid and Thais for Massenet. In 1898, his play Déjanire was performed in a new outdoor arena in Béziers (used primarily for staging bullfights), with incidental music by Saint-Saens. The composer had been dubious about the venue, but the prospect of conducting huge musical ensemble consisting of a choir of hundreds, massed military bands and an orchestra that included 18 harps and an array of 25 trumpets tempted him. The reception was ecstatic.

Twelve years later, Saint-Saens transformed Gallet's play into an opera (by this time Gallet himself was dead) for the Opéra de Monte-Carlo where it was directed by Raoul Gunsbourg. It was the last of Saint-Saëns' twelve operas, was written for Monaco, coming over 30 years after his best-known opera Samson et Dalila.

Subsequently the work appeared at the Paris Opera, and in 1915 in the USA. Rarely performed today, its last outing might have been the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier in 1985 conducted by Serge Baudo. The plot is based on Sophocles The Trachiniae and follows a similar tragic arc to Handel's Hercules. In Wexford, the conductor and director will be George Petrou who was responsible for Wexford's 2025 production of Handel's Deidamia [see my review].

Portrait of Eliška Krásnohorská
by Jan Vilímek

We tend to forget that Smetana wrote nine operas, seven of them coming after The Bartered Bride (1866-1870). Smetana's Tajemství (The Secret) dates from 1878, it is the second of his four collaborations with librettist Eliška Krásnohorská. Krásnohorská (1847-1926) was a Czech feminist author who wrote lyric poetry and literary criticism, along with children's literature and translations of Pushkin and Byron.

Krásnohorská and Smetana's first, and best-known, opera being The Kiss. The plot idea for The Secret was Krásnohorská's and based on several sources, including Les femmes et le secret by La Fontaine. In the opera, Smetana reverted to a somewhat old-fashioned structure of choruses, duets, arias and ensemble pieces (with a pot-pourri overture). After Smetana's death the work languished but returned to Prague in 1922 and has remained in the repertory there ever since. Jack Westrup conducted the work's UK premiered in Oxford in 1958, and it was performed at the Camden Festival in 1972. At Wexford the work will be directed by Polly Graham and conducted by Sasha Scolnik Browe.

The least-known of Wexford's three operas is Carolina Uccelli's Anna di Resburgo (1835). Carolina Uccelli (1801-1858) was born to a minor Florentine noble family and married a prominent surgeon from Pisa. Her debut was the sacred opera, Saul at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence in 1830 (she wrote both libretto and music). This was followed by Anna di Resburgo in Naples in 1832 with a libretto by Gaetano Rossi which had already been set by Meyerbeer (as Emma di Resburgo) in 1819. Uccelli's version lasted only two performance, and the failure was partly attributed to the similarity of the plot to Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor which had had great success in Naples a month before!

Carolina Uccelli (c. 1843)

Uccelli's husband was supportive of her compositional career and there is a third opera, Eufemio da Messina (1833) though no score survives, but she certainly did not have the career that her talent deserved. After Anna di Resburgo she seems to have returned to her aristocratic social circle, composing small-scale pieces and vocal chamber music in Italian and French, published mostly in Paris, where she spent a good deal of time including giving recitals with her daughter, a soprano. But biographical information is rather scarce, and we are lucky that a score of Anna di Resburgo survives in the conservatoire in Naples and the work had its modern premiere in the USA, staged by Teatro Nuovo in 2024. In Wexford the opera will be directed by Rodula Gaitanou and conducted by Sieva Borzak.

In addition the Pocket Operas will be a triple bill consisting of Barber's A Hand of Bridge and Menotti's The Telephone (both with librettos by Menotti), plus Gallantry by Douglas Moore to a libretto by Arnold Shurgard. All three operas date from the late 1940s and 1950s, though the one by Douglas Moore is perhaps the least well-known in Europe. Moore studied with Vincent D'Indy and Ernst Bloch and wrote some 17 stage works including his best known opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe (from 1956). Gallantry, which came two years later, has proved popular with American and Canadian university opera theatre programmes. The librettist of Gallantry, Arnold Shurgard had worked with Kurt Weill on Down in the Valley.

Wexford's Factory Opera and the Community Opera will be joining forces for a production of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro directed by Rosetta Cucchi and conducted by Karen Ní Bhroin, from Ferns in Co Wexford, who last year became the first Irish woman on the podium of the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Full details from Wexford Festival Opera's website.