‘All opera's women are fighters’: Rosetta Cucchi on Wexford Festival Opera’s 2023 programme

For an opera director whose home is Rossini's town, Pesaro, it might sound surprising that Rosetta Cucchi feels that the Irish town of Wexford is in her professional blood. Apart from the fact that both towns are on their respective countries’ east coasts, only opera links the Irish sea with the Adriatic. (And certainly not temperature! It was 36° in Pesaro when we spoke.) Yet that opera bond is strong. Pesaro has been celebrating Rossini for over a century, Wexford Festival Opera has been championing rare opera since 1951, first in its town theatre, now in the smart 800-seat modernist edifice that since 2008 has been Ireland's National Opera House.

'A real baptism of fire' Cucchi began her role in 2020 as the pandemic was taking hold (Image courtesy of Wexford Festival Opera)

Cucchi was there long before the new stage, though. After studying music in Pesaro and Bologna, one of her first roles was as a repetiteur at Wexford for the 1995 festival. 'And,' she says, 'it was Wexford that gave me the first chance to direct' – nine years later, when she staged Prinzessin Brambila by the forgotten Walter Braunfels, director of Cologne's Academy of Music in the post-war years. Normally repetiteurs become conductors, but Cucchi realised that the drama fascinated her as much as the music and gradually directing gained the upper hand, though her background in the musical side of productions means she is one of the few directors able to oversee both.

She was appointed to the role of artistic director to start in 2020. 'I began in all the mess: a real baptism of fire. My feeling was that, in the pandemic, we still had to do something and, after a lot of fights, we did. We had a small group of singers in Wexford itself, then famous names who had appeared in our festivals streamed contributions from wherever they were in the world as a gala. RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann) helped by broadcasting everything.' Now things are getting back to normal but, 'It is a new normality. Audiences are not back to how they were. It is harder to convince them to travel and go to the theatre. Decisions are taken at the last minute, which is a big scare.'

For this year's festival (25 October – 5 November) she has planned productions around the theme of Women and War. This might seem obvious now, but it was not when she had the idea three years ago, well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 'That has made the theme more actual, obviously, but I don't wantto talk about war in just military terms. I want to look at every woman's daily fight against violence and all the other things they have to fight for. All opera's women are fighters and they become heroes but I insist that they are still heroines too.'

Welcoming audiences, first to its town theatre, and then to Ireland's National Opera House, Wexford Festival Opera has been in operation since 1951 ©Patrick Browne

Cucchi has picked three works that she feels reflect her point. There is L'Aube Rouge from 1911, by Camille Erlanger, a pupil of Delibes, in which Olga, the main protagonist, tries to save her husband from the destructive nihilism then sweeping Russia. In Donizetti's 1822 work, Zoraida di Granata also fights against the logic and imperatives that have taken her lover to war. And in the much more recent La Ciociara by Marco Turtino (2015), a mother attempts to shield her daughter from the aftermath of the Battle of Monte Casino in 1945. Turtino's opera is based on the novel by Alberto Moravia which was turned into a massively successful film by Vittorio de Sico, for which Sophia Loren won an Oscar in 1960. ‘It is the perfect metaphor for Italy at the end of World War II,’ Cucchi says, ‘Who was really the winner? The poor, as in Ukraine now, were just trying to survive the war and the violence that, like every war, changes the past and the future. Turtino's original commission for San Francisco Opera had an orchestra that was far too big for Wexford's pit, so I asked him whether he would be prepared to recreate the music for a Beethoven-sized orchestra and he has.'

During the pandemic there was just a core group of young singers living in Wexford and their experience led Cucchi to form the Wexford Factory. 'I wanted to do something for Ireland and give opportunities and training to a new generation of Irish singers. It is important that they have access to good tutors, to exchanges and more experience. So I decided it should be a biennial academy and now we are extending it from just singers to the other roles an opera company needs, like repetiteurs.' This year The Factory has its own production of Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri – continuing the theme, albeit in comedy, of a woman captured in conflict outwitting her kidnappers. This year too, the festival has involved amateur singers and others from the locality for a reworking of Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. 'It has been a great experience and I have been there with them every month since January. It is such a wonderful way of tying the community to the festival.'