Wexford Festival Opera Revives Mascagni's Forgotten 'Iris' in a Symbolic Retelling

Mascagni's "Iris," an opera about an abducted Japanese girl sold into prostitution, returned to the Wexford Festival Opera in a new production staged by Rosetta Cucchi — only the work's occasional revival since it virtually disappeared by the composer's death in 1945.

The opera premiered at Rome's Teatro Costanzi in 1898 to an enthusiastic reception, and opera companies across Europe and the Americas quickly took it up. Then came Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" in 1904, which effectively muscled "Iris" off the stage. Luigi Illica's libretto didn't help: critics have called it relentlessly bleak, misogynistic and reliant on stereotypical impressions of Oriental decadence.

Wexford has history with the piece — it staged the opera once before, in 1995 — but the work has never re-entered the mainstream.

What does the director do with a flawed libretto?

Cucchi couldn't fix the structure, but she could reframe it. Act one introduces Iris, her blind father, the pimp Kyoto, and Osaka, a predatory client. Disguised as puppeteers when the circus comes to town, Kyoto and Osaka entice Iris into a performance and abduct her. Act two, set in a brothel in Yoshiwara (Edo's red-light district), is dramatically intense: the men try flattery, then bribery and threats, before throwing her out. Her father humiliates her, and she throws herself into a sewer and dies.

Then the drama runs out of road. Act three lasts roughly 25 minutes and, as the review for OperaWire notes, "felt like an appendage to an opera that finished with Act two." Iris, not dead after all, hears voices, gives up and embraces the afterlife. The finale's mixed-chorus "Hymn to the Sun" — one of the strongest pieces in the score — just about saves the act from disaster.

Cucchi's solution was interpretive. She staged everything as a symbolic representation of Iris's subconscious, presenting her initially as the Jungian archetype (a universal symbolic figure) of innocence — a child playing with dolls, living in illusions. Kyoto and Osaka become constructs of her own mind, carrying the threat every young girl is eventually forced to confront. Her death in Act two reads as a symbolic loss of innocence; the sewer is reality, which she can finally see clearly. Only then can she transcend to a higher state. Whether the ending is a literal ascent to heaven or a figurative rebirth — "like a butterfly awakening from its transformative sleep" — Cucchi leaves unspecified.

The staging team reinforced the reading at every turn:

• Set designer Tiziano Santi and video designer Thomas Achitz built a golden cage shaped like a 19th-century crinoline frame that Kyoto and Osaka entered at will.
• Achitz's videos shifted between abstract nature imagery and watery dreamscapes, hardening in Act three into a brutal sewer in a wasteland.
• Lighting designer Daniele Naldi bathed the circus scene and the brothel in dark red light, signaling excitement and danger.
• Claudia Pernigotti's costumes included a tattooed Kyoto in aggressive modern clothing, Osaka as a slick man of means, and Iris in a simple white dress.

Kyoto and Osaka, the review notes, are presented as evil figures whose attack on Iris — pure and good — is an attack on beauty itself, which they want "to consume, possess, and destroy." By keeping overt references to Japan to a minimum, Cucchi removed the sense of Oriental decadence and downplayed the misogynistic element.

How did the musical forces fare?

Francesco Cilluffo, Wexford's principal guest conductor, has now conducted nine operas at the festival, eight written between 1886 and 1905 — a period he clearly feels drawn to. He drew from the Wexford Festival Opera Orchestra a performance of warmth, sensitivity and a sure hand, integrating dramatic shifts and climaxes within each act's musical arc and drawing out the score's rich textures and melodic beauty.

Soprano Leyla Gu delivered a flawless Iris. Her slight build, gentle smile and naive enthusiasm captured an immature wonder in Act one; when threatened, she went limp, becoming deadweight in Osaka's arms. Vocally, she molded a light, bright timbre into apparent naiveté, then turned strident with anxiety and fear, powering over the orchestra in her upper register.

Joseph Calleja played Osaka as a stereotypical predator with no redeeming features — confident and domineering in voice, but fairly one-dimensional, with few nuanced emotional responses. Jolyon Loy blossomed as the pimp Kyoto, examining Iris "as a farmer would his cattle," singing with a confidence that built an emotionally volatile brute. Jihoon Kim gave a compelling performance as Il Cieco, the blind father, with a dark, warm bass, turning vicious when he believes his daughter abandoned him. Hannah O'Brien (Dia Sha, the circus performer), Yu Shao (double-cast as a Rag and Bone man and a Merchant), Meilir Jones and Joshua Baxter completed a solid cast.

By any standards, it was a strong production. Cilluffo's mastery of the score and the soloists' performances alone make a case for further productions of "Iris" — and suggest the opera's problems lie in staging, not in Mascagni's music.