---
title: "Wexford Festival Opera Turns 75: Why This Irish Harbour Town Deserves a Place in Your Diary Every October"
description: Wexford Festival Opera turns 75 with Iris, The Gambler and a Rossini comedy chosen by public vote, plus recitals, pop-ups, tours and wild geese.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-10-24T09:47:16.385Z
updated: 2026-10-24T09:47:16.398Z
canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/wexford-festival-opera-turns-75
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/unsplash-slbocnlwnha.webp
categories: Destinations, Food & Culture
content_type: Feature
region: Ireland
publication: Rich Travel Magazine
schema_type: Article
---

In November 1950, the Scottish novelist Sir Compton Mackenzie gave a gramophone talk to a small opera study circle in Wexford. Mackenzie had founded *Gramophone* magazine, so records were his trade, yet he told the circle's chairman, a local doctor named Tom Walsh, to stop listening to opera and start staging it. Walsh took him at his word, and on 21st October 1951 the harbour town opened its own 'Festival of Music and the Arts' in the Theatre Royal, with Michael William Balfe's *The Rose of Castile* on the stage.

Seventy-five years later, Wexford Festival Opera is celebrating its anniversary at the National Opera House from 15th to 31st October 2026, and the whole town has joined the party. In all that time, Wexford has missed only one year: 1960, when the Theatre Royal closed for rebuilding.

## The 2026 theme comes from a formula written in 1974

This year's theme is The Best Of: one for the head, one for the heart, one for fun. The idea is more than fifty years old. In 1974, the incoming director Thomson Smillie, who had run publicity at Scottish Opera, set out the three-opera balance the festival still follows: a singers' opera, a comedy and a 'thinking piece'. Artistic Director Rosetta Cucchi has now given those three evenings their names in public, and each returns to Wexford in a new production built on a fresh critical edition of the score. At the launch, Cucchi said that 'art reminds us that empathy can always unite us'.

## Iris reached Japan six years before Madama Butterfly

The opera for the heart is Pietro Mascagni's *Iris*, which opened at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 22nd November 1898. That one theatre gave the world Mascagni's *Cavalleria rusticana* in 1890, *Iris* in 1898 and Puccini's *Tosca* in 1900, so Rome heard the whole arc of Italian verismo on a single stage within a decade. The librettist of *Iris*, Luigi Illica, went on to co-write *Tosca* and *Madama Butterfly*. When you next watch *Butterfly*, remember that Cio-Cio-San was not Illica's first Japanese heroine.

Iris lives with her blind father on the edge of Edo. The rake Osaka and the brothel keeper Kyoto lure her away with a puppet show and carry her off to the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter. When her father finds her there, he hurls mud at her, and she throws herself into a sewer. Mascagni frames the whole opera with the Sun: a huge choral 'Hymn to the Sun' opens the evening and returns at the end, when Iris dies and becomes the flower whose name she bears.

Joseph Calleja sings Osaka on 15th, 23rd, 28th and 31st October, with Yuchen Pan in the role on 20th October. Calleja first sang at Wexford in 1998, at the start of his career, and says the festival's impact on him has been 'massive'. Mascagni gave Osaka a seductive serenade, so the more beautiful the voice, the more convincing the trap. Cucchi directs, Francesco Cilluffo conducts his third Mascagni production at the festival and Leyla Gu sings Iris.

## A Rossini comedy banned in 1811 won a public vote from 30 countries

For the first time in the festival's history, the audience chose an opera. Last summer, voters from 30 countries picked Gioachino Rossini's *L'equivoco stravagante* as the anniversary's opera for fun.

Rossini was 19 when the comedy opened at the Teatro del Corso in Bologna on 26th October 1811. It was his first large-scale opera, and the authorities shut it down after three performances. The censors objected to the joke at its centre. Gamberotto, a peasant who has grown rich, plans to marry his bookish daughter Ernestina to Buralicchio, a wealthy fool. Ernestina loves her penniless tutor, Ermanno. To get rid of the rival, the servant Frontino forges a letter claiming that Ernestina is really Ernesto, a castrato who deserted the army and is hiding in women's clothes. Buralicchio believes every word and calls the police. A comedy that laughed at conscription, castration and the sale of daughters to rich men was too much for Napoleonic Italy, and it remains wonderfully cheeky today.

Watch Ernestina closely. She enters reading philosophy in her library, a heroine who would rather study than marry, set to music by a 19-year-old more than two centuries ago. Max Hoehn directs and Riccardo Bisatti conducts, both making their Wexford debuts, with Maria Barakova as Ernestina.

## The Gambler began as a novel dictated against a deadline

The opera for the head is Sergei Prokofiev's *The Gambler*, and its origin is as tense as its plot. In 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky was bound by a contract that would hand his publisher the rights to his work for nine years if he failed to deliver a new novel by 1st November. With weeks to go, he hired a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, and dictated *The Gambler* to her in 26 days. He met the deadline and married her the following year. Dostoevsky had lost heavily at the roulette tables of the German spa towns himself, and every page of the novella carries that experience.

Prokofiev wrote his own libretto in 1917, aged 26, during the First World War. The revolution in Russia stopped the planned premiere, and the opera reached the stage only in 1929, at La Monnaie in Brussels. He wanted 'an opera in the declamatory style', so the singers move closer to speech than to aria and the orchestra stays jagged and restless. In the final act, the casino itself takes over as the central character.

Alexei, a tutor obsessed with the General's stepdaughter Polina, breaks the bank at roulette to pay her debts, and she throws the money in his face. When Wexford last staged *The Gambler*, in 1973, it was sung in English. This time you hear it in Russian, directed by Ivan Popovski and conducted by Valentin Uryupin, both new to Wexford.

## Recitals, pop-ups and a backstage breakfast fill your days

The operas fill your evenings, and the festival plans your days too. On 20th, 23rd, 28th, 30th and 31st October, the principal singers step off the main stage for lunchtime recitals in St Iberius Church and the National Opera House, with different artists and repertoire at each one, from arias to lieder. Demand is always high, so book these first.

You do not need a ticket for the pop-ups. Singers perform free opera in cafés, hotels, bars and shops around Wexford, and the festival publishes a map of locations and start times as each day approaches. On 22nd and 29th October, the Backstage and Breakfast Tour takes you through the backstage corridors and onto the stage itself, then up to La Vista café on the top floor for breakfast with views across the town. Festival historical tours run throughout the fortnight.

If you enjoy talk as much as music, the Dr Tom Walsh Lecture has a 75th anniversary edition, and the Irish Times critic Michael Dervan returns with his Impossible Interview, an imagined conversation with a figure from opera history. A 'Whisky Galore' tasting raises a glass to Compton Mackenzie, the author of *Whisky Galore*, who served as festival president from 1951 until his death in 1972. The Opera Train runs for one night only to a performance of *The Gambler*.

The concerts open with Croí na Féile, the anniversary gala on 17th October, where Calleja, Ermonela Jaho, Daniela Barcellona and Giorgi Manoshvili sing with the National Symphony Orchestra under Daniele Callegari. The Gala Concert follows on 25th October, and the choir New Dublin Voices gives its own concert during the festival.

## The first festival of 1951 returns in miniature

The anniversary programme also rebuilds 1951 piece by piece. Balfe, who spent part of his youth in Wexford, returns with *The Rose of Castile* as a Pocket Opera, alongside Charles Villiers Stanford's *Much Ado About Nothing*. *The First Festival*, a new opera by Alberto Caruso and Colm Tóibín for the young singers of the Wexford Factory, has its world premiere on 19th October. It is set in the local tax office in 1951, as word spreads through the town that an opera festival is about to begin. Ailís Ní Ríain's community opera *Still, life...* puts Wexford children, adults and volunteers on stage for another world premiere, and *The Next 75* closes selected evenings as a late-night song cycle.

## Wild geese from Greenland arrive in the same weeks as the opera

Wexford rewards you for staying a few extra days. Three kilometres north of town, the Wexford Wildfowl Reserve on the North Slob hosts close to half the world's Greenland white-fronted geese every winter. The birds fly in from Greenland through Iceland in October, and some people in Wexford link their return to the opening of the opera festival. You can watch them from an eight-metre observation tower and three hides.

On the tip of the Hook Peninsula, Hook Lighthouse is the oldest intact working lighthouse in the world. The Norman knight William Marshal built it about 800 years ago, and guided tours take you up to the balcony above the sea. Closer to town, Johnstown Castle has gardens, lakes and the Irish Agricultural Museum, and its grounds once held the festival itself, in a tent, while the old theatre was being rebuilt. At Curracloe Beach, where Steven Spielberg filmed the D-Day landings for *Saving Private Ryan*, an autumn walk on the sand clears your head before an evening performance.

Just outside town at Ferrycarrig, on the banks of the River Slaney, the Irish National Heritage Park takes you through 9,000 years of Irish history across 16 reconstructed sites, from a dolmen and a crannóg to a Viking ship, each built with the materials and skills of its period. The park also holds the remains of the first fortification the Anglo-Normans built in Ireland, and it stays open through October.

Five kilometres off the coast at Kilmore Quay, the Saltee Islands are home to puffins, gannets and seals. The ferry runs only from April to August, so the islands give you a reason to come back to Wexford in summer.

Back in town, festival fortnight brings fringe exhibitions and craft stalls to the streets, and the pubs live up to their reputation for song long after the curtain falls.

## October in Wexford becomes a habit

The festival builds a new programme around a new theme every year, so a return visit never repeats the last one. Last year, the 2026 programme was announced while the 74th festival was still running, and Friends of the Festival receive priority booking, which gives you first choice of next October's seats.

The other reason to come back is the singers. Wexford heard Sergei Leiferkus before audiences anywhere else outside Russia, gave Juan Diego Flórez a small role in 1996 and introduced Calleja two years later. Mirella Freni, Jaho and Barcellona all sang here early in their careers, as did the conductors Vladimir Jurowski and Michele Mariotti and the director Nicholas Hytner. If you make Wexford an annual trip, you will hear tomorrow's headliners in their first big roles.