Ireland Wexford Festival Opera 2025 [2] – Delius, The Magic Fountain: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Wexford Festival Opera / Francesco Cilluffo (conductor). O’Reilly Theatre, Wexford, 25.10.2025. (RB)
The second of the main operas to be performed this week at the Wexford Opera Festival was Delius’s The Magic Fountain. Delius wrote the work in 1895 after he returned to Europe from a sojourn in the Florida everglades. He planned the work to the be the first in a series of three operas that eventually included Koanga and A Village Romeo and Juliet. The work lay neglected for a century, and the first stage performance only occurred in Kiel in 1997.
The plot involves a Spanish explorer, Solano, who is on a quest to find the Fountain of Eternal Youth. He is shipwrecked at sea and washed ashore off the coast of Florida. He is found by the young Native American woman, Watawa, who brings him to her village. He seeks advice from a village elder and then a mystic about the Fountain of Youth and Watawa agrees to accompany him on his quest to find it. She is initially hostile to Solano because of the impact colonial invaders have had on her people but her feelings towards him change and she eventually falls in love with him. They find the fountain and Watawa tries to dissuade Solano from drinking from it as she knows it brings death to those who are unprepared. When he is undeterred, she drinks from it herself and dies in his arms. Solano follows her to her doom in a Wagnerian Liebestod.
I had mixed feelings about the opera. Delius wrote the libretto himself, and he did not do a good job; the plot is thin, the dialogue wooden and stilted and the characters superficial. He uses a large orchestra, and the music is lush and Romantic with chromatic harmonies and allusions to Wagner. As is often the case with Delius, the music is dreamlike and contemplative and he conjures up pastoral landscapes and moods. The orchestra dominates the proceedings to an unusual degree, and sections of the piece can almost be seen as elaborate tone poems. The vocal lines are clear and lyrical, and they form part of the rich orchestral texture. In the second act some of the plot twists suggested a change in momentum and dramatic pace, but this did not happen, and the music remained contemplative and rhapsodic. Having said that there were a few moments of high drama including a shipwreck in the first act and a tribal war dance in the second.
Christopher Luscombe and his team made a good job of staging this rather unwieldy work. Simon Higlett’s set consisted of the vast interior of a ship in the first act complete with ladders, ropes and a lantern hanging overhead. In the second act, the action shifted to the Florida Everglades. The dense foliage was depicted by myriad green strips descending from the ceiling. Simon Higlett’s tribal costumes were colourful and eye-catching and appropriate for the period. The village seer, Talum Hadjo, ascended on to the stage through swirling mists via a trapdoor and then descended again when he had finished giving his counsel to Watawa. The tribal war dance in the second act was arresting and dramatic; it was well choreographed by Amy Kissiov.
Axelle Saint-Cirel was impressive in the role of Watawa and she sang with great beauty of tone and clarity throughout. She was excellent in ratcheting up the dramatic tension in the final act. Dominick Valdés Chenes was also impressive in the role of Solano singing with vibrancy and a clear ringing tone. His voice had a heroic quality marking him out as a potential future heldentenor. Kamohelo Tsotetsi gave a rather uneven performance in the role of the tribal chief, Wapanacki. His voice did not project well at various points and some of the phrases in the lower vocal register sounded ragged. Meilir Jones did a reasonably good job in portraying the seer, Talum Hadjo, although he did not sound completely comfortable with some elements of the vocal line. Seamus Brady executed his vocal entries well in the minor role of the Spanish sailor. The Wexford Festival Chorus were impressive at the beginning of the opera on board the ship and in the tribal war dance.
Francesco Cilluffo and the Wexford Festival Orchestra brilliantly breathed life into Delius’s uber-Romantic score. In the opening prelude, strings and woodwind combined to suggest a calm, balmy sea and there was particularly beautiful playing from the woodwind, including a sensuous melody from the cor anglais. Cilluffo whipped the lower strings, brass and percussion up into a furious climax during the storm scene at the end of the first act. The music in the second Act is quintessential Delius and Cilluffo and the WFO expertly conjured up pastoral landscapes, creating intoxicating, contemplative moods. Cilluffo successfully ensured there was a good balance between the singers and the large orchestral forces.
I was pleased to have the opportunity to hear this work. However, despite some very fine singing and playing, this opera did not work because of the deficiencies in the libretto and the absence of dramatic tension and momentum. Having said that, It would be a shame for Delius’s score to continue to languish in obscurity given the quality of the orchestral writing. One possible solution might be to extract some of the orchestral interludes and to perform them separately as an orchestral suite.
Robert Beattie
Featured Image: Dominick Valdés Chenes (Solano) and Axelle Saint-Cirel (Watawa) © Pádraig Grant
Production:
Stage Director – Christopher Luscombe
Set and Costume designer – Simon Higlett
Co-Lighting designers – Daniele Naldi, Paolo Bonapace
Choreographer – Amy Share Kissiov
Chorus master – Andrew Synnott
Cast:
Solano – Dominick Valdés Chenes
Watawa – Axelle Saint-Cirel
Wapanacki – Kamohelo Tsotetsi
Talum Hadjo – Meilir Jones
A Spanish Sailor – Seamus Brady