Idea for an opera: Magnolia Grove, in which a nuclear family of whites, cast adrift by financial collapse and mounting property prices, move into the predominantly black Florida suburb of the title and threaten to gentrify the hell out of it, just as all their friends have done elsewhere. The bored and middle-aged pater familias, sworn off the drink that has precipitated the change in his family fortunes, teeters on the brink of a relapse due to his obsession with a local watering hole, The Magic Fountain, and for the twenty-something daughter of his next-door neighbour. Giving in to his desires, he turns up at the bar one night with the daughter and things don’t go well for either of them.
It’s no joke that Frederick Delius’ The Magic Fountain – the third Wexford Festival Opera premiere in as many days – needs a radical rethink if it is ever to make it to the stage again. Unperformed in Delius’ lifetime, the opera wasn’t produced until 1997, more than half a century after the composer’s death, and a very long time after questions arose around a colonial mindset which saw white people set out to explore inchoate Neverlands full of inscrutable exotics in order to reckon with themselves. As it is, the plot of the opera is two-dimensional and the tediously expository libretto weighed down further with a rhyme scheme worthy of William McGonagall.
Spanish explorer Solano is on a quest for the fountain of eternal youth when he is shipwrecked and washes up on the coast of Florida. He meets some Native Americans who tell him his target is close by and one of them, Watawa, agrees to take him there, knowing that any close encounter with the fountain will have exactly the opposite of the effect desired by Solano. That’s all to the good as far as Watawa is concerned, as white explorers have previously decimated her community. However, Solano and Watawa fall in love. Then they both fall into the fountain and die.
Undeniably, Delius’s gigantic score – heard here with as many instruments as can squeeze into Wexford’s roomy pit under Francesco Cilluffo – is worth a listen, and it’s a rare treat to hear it in full (there is only one recording). His shimmering seascape gives way to the roiling storm courtesy of a plentitude of horns and lower strings, before arrival on calm shores brings out cor anglais and clarinets, the musical language combining Wagnerian storytelling with something much more impressionistic and jazz-like. It’s a shame that Delius didn’t live long enough to send his neglected large-scale compositions to a film producer.
Director Christopher Luscombe presents a period piece that takes Delius’ original at face value, making no efforts in the way of character development that might dust the narrative from history’s understairs cupboard. Designer Simon Higlett builds an impressively detailed Melville-style ship only to wreck it in the storm and replace it with an emblematic fringe motif that serves as both shining sea and waving grass, and renders everything that happens amongst the Native Americans mysterious and dreamlike. Most mysterious – apart from his wonderful voice – is the presentation of Meilir Jones as Talum Hadjo, the seer, festooned with face paints and feathers, rising from an underground lair decorated with dead chickens. The thinking here was presumably that his role is balanced against that of local chieftain Wapanacki, sung by Kamohelo Tsotetsi. But what does Talum Hadjo or Wapanacki do the rest of the time? How do they live? What is the reality of their lives beyond their outward appearance? Delius – despite his time managing an orange plantation in Florida, where he heard and admired the African American music whose influences are audible in the score – seems to have had as little idea as many of his generation. That Luscombe doesn't appear to either is problematic.
Axelle Saint-Cirel powered her way through what felt – to me – the uncomfortable challenge of taking on the role of Watawa. Delius’ vocal writing offers curiously little variation and it’s only as Watawa uttered her dying words about the sweet magnolia grove that we got a feel for how much Saint-Cirel could do at a lesser dynamic. Dominick Valdés-Chenes gave the shipwrecked explorer plenty of welly vocally but his physical awkwardness made him an unlikely suitor.
It’s just about possible this opera could work with a cast featuring (beyond the shipwreck) only one white man and in which all the people of colour in the story had discernible personalities and were able to demonstrate that their lives had a day-to-day, tangible reality. Nobody needs to be daubing tribal markings on the Wexford chorus in 2025.
Eleanor's press trip was funded by Fáilte Ireland
This review was updated in respect to a comment made on the role of Watawa. The author did not wish to imply that the singer shared the same perception. We apologise for the assumption.
