Reviewed by Tom Hardwick

If the Wexford Festival is known and acclaimed for its commitment to reviving obscurer corners of the operatic repertoire, how could it also manage to open its 2025 season with one of Giuseppe Verdi’s best-known works? The instant success of Il Trovatore after its première in Rome in 1853 encouraged the financially astute composer to revise it for the lucrative Paris market, which preferred operas in French, before pirate versions of the score could deprive him of rights and royalties.

Verdi transformed Il Trovatore into Le Trouvère, revising the score to take account of the French text, adding a ballet to conform to the format of the Paris Opera (and justify his fee), tweaking the final scene, and overseeing the first performance in February 1857. Le Trouvère enjoyed a long reign in France and its colonies, before falling from favour by the 1930s. Musicological research led by David Lawton has encouraged revivals and the production of a critical edition of Le Trouvère. If Wexford could have its cake and eat it with this very familiar rarity, there’s an eeriness in hearing unanticipated words to very familiar melodies – who would have guessed “di quella pira” rendered down to “bûcher infame” – which remains slightly disconcerting.

Director Ben Barnes brought forward Verdi’s plot, originally set in medieval Spain and encompassing love triangles, civil war, burnings at the stake, and a gipsy’s curse, to the Spanish Civil War. The rebellious troubadour Manrique is now a dashing bicycle-mounted leader of an Anarcho-Syndicalist detachment; the Comte de Luna, his rival for Leonore, is a smartly uniformed Nationalist, albeit one who seems very happy to break into convents (shouldn’t it have been the other way round?). Liam Doona’s single set, with lofty shuttered openings upstage, flexibly suggested bivouacs, cafes and prison cells, as well as the bedroom where Leonore and Manrique finally manage to spend some time before fate and duty tear them apart.

The major difference between Il Trovatore and Le Trouvère is the ballet sequence at the start of Act III. Although rarely performed, the music showcases Verdi’s talent for orchestral writing, and the Wexford Festival Opera Orchestra sparkled under conductor Marcus Bosch. In 1857 the ballet illustrated the colourful life of a gypsy encampment, but it presents a problem for contemporary directors lacking the huge corps de ballet and budget of the Paris Opera. Ben Barnes used newsreel footage of the Spanish Civil War, and three rifle-toting dancers, to turn the ballet into the Comte de Luna’s uneasy dreams, but it remained one of the slacker parts of a production that usually kept the action belting along; in the last act the imprisoned Manrique and the gypsy Azucena (his mother – or is she?) even rose rather squeakily through the floor to avoid a scene change and keep the melodies unfurling.

The Wexford Festival Opera Chorus convinced as revolutionaries, soldiers, monks, and (especially) nuns, but the grand scenes only serve to outline the relationships between the four leads. Kseniia Nikolaieva sang Azucena powerfully but with few consonants, while Giorgi Lomiselli grew into the Comte de Luna and put some depth into one of Verdi’s less engaging baddies. Lydia Grindatto as Leonore showed no signs of the illness that was announced at curtain up, and Eduardo Niave, whose French accent was the best in the cast, was a young and charismatic Manrique. A solid – and sold out – start to the 2025 Festival.

You can watch this production of Le Trouvère below: