Wexford Festival Opera

The Wexford Festival Opera is an opera festival that takes place in the town of Wexford in south-eastern Ireland during the months of October and November.

The festival began in 1951 under Tom Walsh and a group of opera lovers who quickly generated considerable interest by programming unusual and rare works, a typical festival staging three operas. This concept has been maintained over the company's history under the direction of seven different artistic directors. From the beginning, the company embraced new and upcoming young singers, many of whom were Irish, but it also included new international names who made first appearances there.

By the 1960s Czech and Russian operas entered the repertory, while the 1970s saw an interest in the operas of Jules Massenet under director Thomson Smillie, followed by an emphasis on Italian operas from the end of that decade. However, into the mix there appeared more modern operas by Benjamin Britten and Carlisle Floyd while Elaine Padmore's 12-year tenure resulted in more international singers making first appearances and the beginnings of commercial recordings and radio broadcasts.

The current artistic director since 2005, David Agler, oversaw the creation of a new opera house with enhanced facilities on the site of the original theatre.

Under its founding director, Tom Walsh, Wexford began a steady climb to international success. He was succeeded by a variety of talented individuals who maintained and expendaded upon the festival's basic philosophy.

The origins of the opera festival lie in a visit to Ireland in November 1950 by Sir Compton Mackenzie, the founder of the magazine The Gramophone, and an erudite writer on music, who gave a lecture to the Wexford Opera Study Circle. Mackenzie suggested the group should stage an opera in their own theatre, the Theatre Royal (subsequently the Festival's permanent venue until 2005), a theatre which he felt was eminently suited to the production of certain operas.

The result was that a group of opera lovers (including Dr. Tom Walsh who was to become the festival's first artistic director) planned a "Festival of Music and the Arts" (as the event was first called) from 21 October to 4 November 1951. The highlight was a production of the 19t-century Irish composer Michael William Balfe's 1857 The Rose of Castille, a little-known opera which had also been mentioned by James Joyce in Ulysses in a striking pun (Balfe is probably best known for The Bohemian Girl).

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