Going solo in Ireland

Wexford’s remarkable opera house is as good a symbol as any of the Irish financial meltdown. The auditorium is fabulous, and not just acoustically. The building — funded by the Irish government just before the banks collapsed — is now the trump card that has preserved the Wexford Festival as Ireland’s sole surviving operatic gesture. There was a brief fantasy moment when a previous culture minister talked about creating an Irish national company in Dublin, and the Arts Council of Ireland said it would provide over €5 million for the artform. But dream on. Instead, Opera Ireland has been wound up and Opera Theatre Company reduced to a shadow.

Wexford is the wrong place to have built Ireland’s only opera house. But this unusual festival devoted to operas that never flew and probably never will is an established international fixture that this year attracted fewer critics from Britain than from the world’s opera factory, Germany.