Verdi - Le trouvère (Wexford, 2025)

Giuseppe Verdi - Le trouvère

Wexford Festival Opera, 2025

Marcus Bosch, Ben Barnes, Eduardo Niave, Lydia Grindatto, Giorgi Lomiseli, Kseniia Nikolaieva, Luca Gallo, Conor Prendiville, Jade Phoenix, Philip Kalmanovitch, Vladimir Sima, Conor Cooper

O'Reilly Theatre, National Opera House, Wexford - 21st October 2025

No-one would consider Il trovatore a rarely performed opera, but the French version that Verdi reworked for the Paris Opera definitely qualifies for Wexford Festival Opera's focus on lost and scarcely known works. Being a lost and forgotten opera is no indication of lack of quality: there are many reasons why operas fall into neglect. It's a fate suffered even by many worthwhile Verdi operas and Verdi's French operas are always fascinating and all too rarely seen. That's definitely the case with Le trouvère, and Marcus Bosch's production for the festival managed to breathe a little bit of new life and meaning into a work that in its more popular Italian form has become quite stale.

In whichever version you present it however, Il trovatore is always going to be a problematic opera or at least a challenge. Aside from the overheated plot, the music has been overplayed over the years and there is a danger of it losing its impact through familiarity, or perhaps not losing its impact - since those famous arias and choruses still resound powerfully - but allowed to become too 'operatic' and detached from real human stories. Le trouvère, at the very least, provides an opportunity to hear the opera afresh, and indeed the Wexford production - for their 2025 Myths and Legends themed programme - managed to delve deeper beneath the surface storytelling and find some extra character in the work.

In comparison to some of the operas that Verdi rewrote or adapted for the Paris Opera, Le trouvère remains very much the familiar Il trovatore. With a few exceptions of course, not least the fact that the libretto was rewritten in French with suitable minor changes of music for the flow of the language, but perhaps the biggest revision or concession is of course the addition of a new 30-minute ballet sequence at the start of the third Act. In terms of musical character and plot melodrama however, Le trouvère is essentially the same as the Italian version. If you want to draw a distinction of differences between the two, there's not much new here to go on - unless you are Robert Wilson of course (but there was only one of those) - but the ballet sequence alone gives more scope to develop and establish a different character for the opera.

Director Ben Barnes rightly recognises that the medieval historical setting is hardly relevant to that, so much so that even though bringing it closer to our own time in this production to the period of the Spanish Civil War, it still has no significant impact or additional relevance, and in itself doesn't lend the opera any greater depth. Not that Le trouvère or Il trovatore needs it. It's a full-blooded melodrama, a Verdi blood and thunder melodrama, and all the impact is there in the dramatic writing, the tortured souls, the overwrought plot of hidden switched identities and fateful mistakes that take a shocking turn of events. Legends and stories should be on this kind of grand scale, but they can and should still retain the essence of humanity in them. It's there in Verdi, to some extent, and it helps if a director can find a way to bring that out.

The war context of each of the scenes is effectively staged, the images and impact of war on the people is evident, the Spanish setting well defined, but in terms of direction of the singers it was rather stiffly choreographed and all too often would fall back on opera mannerisms. A lot of this of course is 'in-built' in the opera, which amounts to a number of set pieces and star turns for the artists. Despite the strong passionate singing it was hard to feel any real human story in the fragmented structure, the stop-starting as the drama stopped to allow the singers to take their take their aria before entering back into the real (opera) world.

As good as the singing was, there was very little sense of any real interaction or drive to the love-hate drama between them. For individual performances of those classic roles however we had fine voices in Mexican tenor Eduardo Niave as Manrique and soprano Lydia Grindatto as Leonore. Giorgi Lomiseli sounded a little hesitant initially as Le Comte de Luna, but very much came into the as the drama unfolded. The most exciting performance came from Kseniia Nikolaieva's Azucena. It's a role of course designed to introduce that wildcard element of danger and unpredictability, seeking to find not so much vengeance as justice, and Nikolaieva made every one of her scenes count in raising the tensions. The rising star Irish soprano Jade Phoenix, who made a great impact in 2023 in Wexford in Marco Tutino's La ciociara, was underused as Inés but made an impression nonetheless.

There didn't appear to be much that was going to distinguish this Le trouvère from the many other productions of Il trovatore seen through the ages, but it was at the start of the third act when the inserted ballet music written by Verdi came into play and made a little more sense of it. Presenting it as a dream/nightmare of the Count, there was nothing particularly revelatory in the use of the generic Spanish Civil War footage mostly of troops marching and people on the streets, but with three dancers and some shadow play it effectively blended the human love story with the imagery of the wider war. What it captured was the weight of history, of long feuds between nations and mistrustful neighbours. It reminded you that Il trovatore or Le trouvère is not as excessive as you might think in its horror story or in the passions it evokes. Worse things happen in wartime, as the news reminds us every day now.

There are a number of Ukrainian refugees in Ireland at the moment (and scandalously on the very night I attended this performance, a mob of thugs was attacking a hotel of asylum seekers in Dublin) and many are finding success in Ireland as in the rest of Europe on the opera stage. That was the case with this opera's Azucena, Kseniia Nikolaieva, and I would imagine her own experiences and emotions would have fed into her performance. It showed. And if the production as a whole succeeded in relating those heightened Verdi rhythms, pacing and emotional overload of the brutality and suffering of war for the audience, imagine how much more it meant to the Ukrainian contingent. Without having to make any grand gestures - in an opera that usually calls out for grand gestures - Wexford's production of Le trouvère paid tribute in its own way by doing justice to those caught up in the horror of war.

External links: Wexford Festival Opera, Wexford Festival Opera Streaming on RTE Lyric FM

Goldmark - Ein Wintermärchen (Wexford, 2021)

Karl Goldmark - Ein Wintermärchen

Wexford Festival Opera, 2021

Marcus Bosch, Burkhard Fritz, Sophie Gordeladze, Ava Dodd, Simon Thorpe, Daniel Szeili, Rory Musgrave, Jevan McAuley, Niamh O'Sullivan, Conor Gahan, Ben Knight, Vladimir Sima, Sheldon Baxter, Peter Lidbetter, Fiona Finsbury 

National Opera House, O'Reilly Theatre, Wexford - 21st October 2021

If the other operas in Wexford's 'Shakespeare in the Heart' programme (Edmea, Le Songe d’une nuit d’été) had only a tenuous connection with actual Shakespeare texts, the inclusion of Karl Goldmark's Ein Wintermärchen ('The Winter's Tale') at least promised a more authentic Shakespearean experience. Sadly reduced to concert performance while Covid restrictions are still in place in Ireland, it nonetheless proved to be just that, the rarely performed opera working closely to the plot of Shakespeare's drama with only minor concessions to compressing the extended timeline. Musically too it proved to be in keeping with the mood of Shakespeare's great late romance, much more authentic to the original than most opera adaptations of Shakespeare tend to be.

Musically, not being familiar with Goldmark as an opera composer - his grand opera Die Königin von Saba ('The Queen of Sheba') achieved fame in its day but is not performed now - I wasn't quite sure what musical tradition to place him within. There's his friendship with Mahler and the influence of Wagner - whether positive or as a reaction against it would have been almost impossible for a composer around this time not to acknowledge Wagner - perhaps give some clue to a certain type of sound. Even looking at the musical choices of the cast in the programme and indeed the type of singers cast for this opera all pointed in a similar direction. Perhaps the greatest influence on Goldmark however appears to be his Hungarian born origin and the whole Viennese musical world that he is associated with. There's as much Johann Strauss as Richard Strauss in Ein Wintermärchen, but perhaps even more Dvořák in the melodic richness of the orchestration.

If you had any familiarity with Shakespeare's great late play and indeed Philippe Boesman's fine modern opera version of the work (Wintermärchen, 1999) then there was little need for staging, even though this drama is famous for its unusual stage directions and extravagant magical touches. While those stage effects were missed in concert performance, leaving a few gaps to be filled by the imagination, it's mood more than anything that is essential in Ein Wintermärchen. That was provided by the cool blue lighting and backdrop in this concert performance of the opera, but also evidently in Goldmark's well-calibrated score that was enhanced by the fine acoustics of the magnificent O'Reilly theatre at the National Opera House in Wexford.

Ein Wintermärchen and indeed Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale is not all as cold, dark and gloomy as it suggests, nor is it in the realm of Korngold-like lush fantasy either. Act I is the most plot driven, the warm friendship and pleasantries exchanged between Leontes and Polixenes, the rulers of Sicily and Bohemia, breaking down very quickly as Leontes succumbs to bitter jealousy and suspicion about the relationship between Polixenes and his pregnant wife Hermione. This descends with devastating effect to the next stage of murder plots and shocking deaths. When Hermione dies, the new-born baby of his dead wife is repudiated and abandoned to her fate at sea.

Act II of the opera opens by way of contrast with jaunty folk dance music, as the character of Time puts 16 years distance between those fateful events and the pastoral scenes in Bohemia. The lost child of Hermione has been rescued from where she was abandoned and brought up by a shepherd. The pure beauty of Perdita however sets her apart from her folk and she enjoys the love of the Prince Florizel, the son of Polixenes who has no knowledge of her background. (No one does in fact, the only person who might have known having made their fatal "exit, pursued by a bear"). Despite objections by Polixenes, the marriage takes place and the act closes with the music of Viennese waltzes as preparations are made for a reconciliatory trip to Sicily.

Unlike many adaptations of Shakespeare that struggle to compress and rework a huge complex plot down into lyrical theatre, Goldmark's opera almost seems leisurely in its handling of the play, taking time to revel in mood, character and situation. It feels as if it is genuinely soaking up the character of the work, letting it breathe with musical personality rather than being slavish to the exigencies of the plot. Inevitably there are cuts to secondary characters and scenes, the tighter focus making it more difficult to establish the long passing of time and the weight this places on the regrets, mistakes and longing of the characters. You lose a little more in a concert performance without stage effects, but Goldmark's writing ensures that the concluding Act III still comes across dramatically and effectively.

Again, familiarity with the play and with its dramatic interventions and revelations helps fill in the gaps left by the concert performance, and what we lose in stage representation we gain by way of an opportunity to properly hear Goldmark's orchestral arrangements and be able to focus on the musical qualities of this rare work. It was performed to the usual high standard under the baton of Marcus Bosch in the fine acoustics of Wexford's superb opera house. There was no reduced orchestration this time, as there was with the previous performances of Edmea, Le Songe d’une nuit d’été, so the audience were able to enjoy the full orchestration of this fascinating work.

An excellent cast also gave this work a fine presentation. Burkhard Fritz got the drama off to a suitably intense start in Act II with his troubled Leontes and there was good playing alongside him from Sophie Gordeladze as Hermione and Simon Thorpe's Polixenes. Sheldon Baxter was a warm toned shepherd Valentin, there was powerful projection from tenor Daniel Szeili as Florizel and a bright Perdita in Ava Dodd. Niamh O'Sullivan's Paulina was also notable and well-received by the audience at the curtain call. They all come together wonderfully with the chorus providing strong backing in the third Act (conductor and composer Andrew Synnott managing all the festival chorus duties this year). It would have been lovely to see Ein Wintermärchen staged for full effect, but the qualities were nonetheless clearly apparent in this Wexford Festival Opera concert performance.

Links: Wexford Festival Opera