Iris by Pietro Mascagni

Opera in three acts
Music by Pietro Mascagni
Libretto by Luigi Illica
Sung in Italian with English surtitles

First performance: 22 November, 1898 at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome
Previously staged at Wexford Festival Opera in October 1995

Iris is a sensory feast and a rare opportunity to experience Italian opera at its most atmospheric and emotionally raw. Set not in a literal Japan, but a mythical one, it is a striking, symbolic masterpiece exploring the fragility of innocence in an uncaring world.

Mascagni is best known for his first opera to be staged, Cavalleria rusticana, the work that changed operatic history by launching the verismo movement with panache and which opened in the Italian capital in 1890 to overwhelming acclaim. Iris – the fifth of his works to grace the Wexford stage – offers something more ethereal. Conducted by Francesco Cilluffo, whose reputation as a definitive interpreter of Mascagni’s lush scores is further cemented by this, his third production of the composer’s work at the Festival.

The opera invites us into the inner world of Iris, a young girl lured from her home into the city’s dark pleasure quarters. A victim of societal corruption and exploitation, Iris remains luminous and untouched even as the world around her grows monstrous. She is a figure of tragic isolation – an object to be desired or judged, navigating a path toward a harrowing yet transcendent end. Musically staggering, powerful and provocative, Iris features one of the most dramatic choral sequences in the entire opera repertoire. The magnificent ‘Hymn to the Sun’ bookends the opera, serving as both a powerful prologue and a redemptive, mystical epilogue.