The fabulous operas: Medea, Margherita and Risurrezione

MARGHERITA, with a libretto by Giorgio Giachetti, sung in Italian with English surtitles, is a co-production with Oldenburghisches Staatstheater in Germany. It’s the second Foroni work to be staged at Wexford, following Cristina, regina di Svezia in 2013.

Foroni’s Margherita was first performed at the King’s Theatre in Milan on March 4, 1848, two weeks before the Five Days of Milan rebellion during which city inhabitants rose up against Austrian rulers.

Jacopo Foroni, who was involved in the revolt, left Italy with many others after the failure of the uprising. He worked as a conductor with a number of touring companies in opera houses around Europe before settling in Sweden. He died in Stockholm at the age of 34 during a cholera epidemic in 1858, leaving behind a small body of work that includes four operas.

Margherita, the first opera Foroni composed, is a comedy in which a soldier and his betrothed are kept apart by confusion, duels, mistaken identity, treachery and jealousy. Among the Wexford cast is Italian Filippo Fontana (as Roberto) who has taken to the Wexford Festival Opera stage on two previous occasions: for Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze in 2013 and Don Bucefalo in 2014. RISURREZIONE, sung in Italian with English surtitles, is the second opera from Franco Alfano to be performed at Wexford Festival – Sakùntala was staged here in 1982. A composer and pianist, Alfano had considerable success with several of his own works during his lifetime, but he is perhaps best known for completing another composer’s work - Turandot - left unfinished at the time of Puccini’s death.

First performed at the Teatro Vittorio Emanuele in Turin on November 30, 1904, Risurrezione tells of the young aristocrat, Nekhlyudov, who while serving on a jury recognises the prostitute Katerina Maslova as the young girl he had once seduced, and how he rejects his former life and follows her to Siberia, trying to undo past wrongs.

The libretto by Cesare Hanau is based on the novel ‘Resurrection’ by Leo Tolstoy (who hated opera, because he thought it superficial). ‘Resurrection’ was something of a manifesto, but little of that comes through in Alfano’s adaptation, and his opera concentrates on the drama of personal relationships.

The opera quickly became a hit in operatic capitals from Paris to Chicago, containing as it does such hits as ‘Dio pietoso’, a one-time favourite of the legendary Mary Garden and other sopranos since.