Dhe lively melody of the Irish national anthem, for which the audience rises before every performance at the Wexford Opera Festival, which specializes in rarities, belies the warlike nature of the text. Originally written in English, the verses of the republican soldier’s song from the time of the escalating independence movement at the beginning of the 20th century were subsequently translated into Gaelic, a language that less than forty percent of the population speaks something and only ten percent claim to know very well . It remains a matter of speculation how many people know what they are singing in the beautiful little opera house between the terraced houses of the fishing town at the mouth of the Slaney when it says that the soldiers are enlisting “amidst the roar of cannons and shotgun blasts”. to dedicate their lives to a free Ireland. What is certain is that many Irish people feel that their national anthem is not in keeping with their country’s modern identity.
The everyday battles
However, it fits with the theme of the 72nd festival, which bundles three melodramas in the main program under the unfortunately always current title “Women and War”. The current conditions in Ukraine and Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel gave the game plan additional explosiveness. In the spirit of the feminist zeitgeist, Rosetta Cucchi, who has been running the festival since 2020, is expanding the term to include the everyday battles that women have to fight because of their gender. Women like the young widowed grocery store owner Cesira in Marco Tutino’s opera “La Ciociara”: It premiered in San Francisco in 2015 and is based on the novel by Alberto Moravia, published in 1957, which dealt with his own war experiences in the poor area called Ciociaria southeast of Rome .
The film version “And Yet They Live” with Sophia Loren won director Vittorio de Sica an Oscar. The plot: When the battle for Rome comes to a head in 1943, Cesira closes her shop and flees to her native Ciociaria with her adolescent daughter Rosetta. But there the war catches up with them. In the declining fascist regime, the confused peasantry tries to come to terms between the German occupiers and the advancing Allies. It’s delicious how Rosetta Cucchi creates the vignette-like scene at the bourgeois table, in which the stuffy, follower-like mother’s boy talks to the German officer (Alexander Kiechle) billeted with the family, while the Italian mother prepares the confrontation with the partisan Michele (Leonardo Caimi ) tries to defuse it by constantly giving more food.
Tense table company: scene from the opera La ciociara
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Image: Clive Barda
The tough fight for survival has a transformative effect on Cesira and her daughter. While the trauma of a mass rape by Moroccan mercenaries destroys the childlike innocence of Rosetta, hauntingly sung by the young soprano Jade Phoenix, and turns her into a cynical young woman, the Israeli mezzo-soprano Na’am Goldman touchingly brings out the soft core in the hard shell of the courageous mother Light.
Tutino composes against the tide of time in the idiom of traditional Italian opera. His Puccini-like neoverism creates the tonal effect of film music, especially in the new orchestration for the smaller Wexford Festival Orchestra under the vital direction of Franceso Cilluffo. Tutino’s adaptation of the story is based more on the film than on the novel, with the peripheral figure of Cesira’s admirer Giovanni being fleshed out in the opera as the epitome of the unscrupulous turncoat, whose lower character is subtly captured by the baritone Devid Cecconi. Cucchi also refers to the film by staging the opera as a play within a play. In the director’s chair at the edge of the stage, de Sica is supposed to represent the creative head who reflects on the artistic implementation of the material, while a dancer ghosting through Tiziano Santi’s stage designs embodies the inspiration. With thunderous applause, the audience justifies Tutino’s efforts to reconcile Italian opera with tradition after the break of modernity.
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