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A Dream of Beauty and Cruelty Wexford
National Opera House
10/15/2026 - & October 20, 23*, 28, 31, 2026
Pietro Mascagni: Iris
Leyla Gu (Iris), Joseph Calleja*/Yuchen Pan (Osaka), Jihoon Kim (Il Cieco), Jolyon Loy (Kyoto), Hannah O’Brien (Dhia), Yu Shao (Ragpicker, Haberdasher), Meilir Jones (First Ragpicker), Joshua Baxter (Second Ragpicker)
Wexford Festival Opera Chorus, Andrew Synnott (chorus master), Wexford Festival Opera Orchestra, Francesco Cilluffo (conductor)
Rosetta Cucchi (stage director), Tiziano Santi (sets), Claudia Pernigotti (costumes), Thomas Achitz (video projections), Libby Seward (choreography), Daniele Naldi (lighting)
L. Gu (© Padraig Grant)
Some will recognise the opening and closing Hymn to the Sun and Osaka’s Act I serenade, “Apri la tua finestra”, subsequently recalled by Iris in the third act. Beyond these comparatively familiar landmarks, Pietro Mascagni’s Iris offers few melodies that readily lodge in the memory. Its lyrical inspiration is intermittent, its dramatic continuity uneven, and its orchestral writing sometimes less compelling than its most ardent vocal outbursts. Compared with his contemporary Giacomo Puccini, Mascagni was a more modest melodic inventor, which helps explain why the composer who took the operatic world by storm with Cavalleria rusticana has become, for many listeners, the archetypal one‑opera composer.
Yet to dismiss Iris, premiered in Rome in 1898, as a failed attempt to repeat that early triumph would be to overlook its more ambitious aspirations. Mascagni was experimenting with a theatrical language that departed from the verismo associated with his name, embracing the atmospheric, the symbolic and the deliberately unreal. The result is an intriguing, imperfect work whose most arresting qualities emerge when its music, imagery and dramatic conceit converge.
Three artistic movements illuminate the opera’s peculiar character. Japonisme, the European fascination with Japanese art and aesthetics that flourished in the latter half of the nineteenth century, had transformed painting, decorative arts and theatrical design. Japanese prints offered Western artists flattened pictorial space, asymmetrical compositions, stylised natural forms and perspectives that challenged conventional European representation. Japan became not merely a country to be depicted but an imaginative alternative to Western artistic habits.
Symbolism, meanwhile, sought to suggest rather than explain, privileging dreams, correspondences, spiritual intimations and the suggestive power of images over the literal representation of external reality. Its operatic legacy is most familiar through Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s play. Verismo, the movement with which Mascagni is most readily associated, pursued a seemingly contrary ambition: to confront audiences with recognisable human passions and social realities. Alongside Cavalleria rusticana, its most familiar landmarks include Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier and Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur.
Iris occupies an uneasy but fascinating intersection between these tendencies. Its Japanese setting is not an ethnographic portrait but a stylised landscape of flowers, temples, puppets, erotic fantasies and spiritual intimations. Japan becomes the imagined setting for a European fable about innocence violated by the appetites and prejudices of the world.
The libretto by Luigi Illica, who would later collaborate on Madama Butterfly, gives the principal characters names that are almost programmatic. Iris is the flower‑like innocent; her father is simply Il Cieco, the Blind Man; and her two principal persecutors are Osaka and Kyoto, named after Japanese cities. They are less convincingly individualised inhabitants of a society than embodiments of desire, commercial exploitation and paternal authority. The naming itself suggests a world in which the characters function as moral and psychological figures.
The plot is brutally simple. Iris, the innocent daughter of a blind old man, is lured from her home by Osaka, a wealthy libertine, and abducted with the assistance of Kyoto, who operates a geisha establishment. When she refuses Osaka’s advances, she is exposed to the public. Her father, deceived into believing that she has voluntarily abandoned him, curses her and covers her face with mud. Overwhelmed by incomprehension and despair, Iris throws herself into a sewer. The following morning, after hearing the voices of her tormentors in her delirium, she welcomes the returning sunlight. As she dies, her body is lifted heavenward, and the opening hymn returns as a promise of transcendence.
The disturbing contradiction is that Iris is simultaneously a victim of sexual exploitation and an idealised figure whose purity seems to require her ignorance of the world. Her final apotheosis may suggest spiritual victory, but it also raises an uncomfortable question: must the woman be destroyed before she can be restored to innocence?
The temptation to regard Iris merely as an imperfect precursor to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is understandable. Both operas emerged from the European fascination with Japan, both have libretti by Illica, and both place a vulnerable Japanese woman at the centre of a tragedy shaped by male power. But their dramatic conceptions differ fundamentally.
In Madama Butterfly, Cio-Cio-San is a psychologically particularised individual. Her tragedy arises from her faith in a marriage that Pinkerton regards as provisional, a collision between incompatible understandings of commitment, and the colonial privilege that allows an American officer to abandon the Japanese woman whose life he has appropriated. She possesses a will, an imagination and a capacity for self‑deception that make her downfall both personal and socially intelligible.
Iris, by contrast, belongs to a symbolic universe. She is deceived, exploited and rejected, but her suffering is principally the means by which the opera establishes the opposition between purity and corruption. Her father’s literal blindness becomes moral blindness: unable to recognise the circumstances of her victimisation, he condemns the very daughter who has been wronged. Where Butterfly’s suicide leaves an irreparable catastrophe, Iris’s death is transformed into a celestial deliverance.
Neither opera escapes the Orientalism through which European culture imagined the East as exotic, sensual and fundamentally other. Yet Iris makes its artificiality particularly evident. Its Japan is an aesthetic construct, not a convincing social world. Puccini, for all the limitations of his own cultural perspective, would achieve a more sustained psychological drama by making the heroine’s inner life inseparable from the music.
Mascagni nevertheless deserves to be heard on his own terms. His score is not simply an inferior rehearsal for Puccini’s achievement. It attempts a different kind of opera, in which atmosphere and symbolic transformation are at least as important as character development.
Rosetta Cucchi, whose Il viaggio a Reims at Wexford and L’Italiana in Algeri at Pesaro demonstrated her flair for theatrical reinvention, understands that Iris should not be treated as a second Madama Butterfly. Rather than attempting to naturalise its implausibilities, she embraces the work’s dreamlike logic, presenting the heroine’s passage from innocence through degradation to death as a subjective nightmare.
Her production combines puppetry, choreography, acrobatics, videography, and stylised stage pictures to externalise Iris’s limited understanding of the events overtaking her. The approach is particularly apt for a heroine whose tragedy lies partly in her inability to comprehend the designs of those around her. What appears to Iris as a fairy tale gradually reveals itself as a nightmare from which there is no awakening.
Tiziano Santi’s sets and Thomas Achitz’s video projections establish an evocative, deliberately unreal Japan, avoiding the familiar conventions of sliding screens, decorative kimonos and picturesque authenticity that have become almost inescapable in productions of Madama Butterfly. Here, Japan is a state of mind: seductive, disquieting and ultimately hostile.
The cages in which Iris and the other women are displayed constitute one of the production’s more effective images. Their physical confinement evokes the elaborate structures historically used to shape the female silhouette, while their theatrical function is unmistakable: these women are possessions, their bodies and sexuality subject to the control of others. The cage is at once prison, display case and instrument of commodification.
The Act II setting, in which Iris awakens in the pleasure quarter believing herself to have entered Paradise, provides the central dramatic irony. The gilded environment promises enchantment while concealing a system of exploitation. Her innocence is not simply threatened by the men who surround her; it is made profitable by them.
The final rubbish heap is repellent yet strangely beautiful. Here the opera’s visual imagination is at its most persuasive: the world discards Iris as readily as it discards the objects and bodies that have ceased to serve its purposes. The aerial transformation that lifts her from the gutter towards the heavens may strike some spectators as an over‑literal rendering of the symbolism. Yet it has a certain dramaturgical logic, especially if the staging is from Iris’s perspective. Earlier in the production, Kyoto and his associates exploit the imagery of celestial elevation to lure the innocent girl away from home; in the finale, that same theatrical promise is fulfilled, albeit at the cost of her life.
Not every device is equally successful. Puppetry, acrobats, dance and video projections can illuminate the subjective dimension of the opera, but their accumulation occasionally risks making the production resemble an illustrated gallery of ideas. The mise en scene mounted by Kyoto and Osaka was especially effective. Act I’s surreal underwater floral images were breathtaking as well as destabilizing. Symbolism is not necessarily deepened by multiplying symbols. Cucchi’s best images are those that emerge directly from the drama; elsewhere, the machinery of interpretation threatens to compete with the music it is intended to serve.
Nevertheless, she offers a coherent reading of a work whose theatrical conventions might otherwise appear dated or objectionable. Most importantly, she makes visible the violence beneath the aestheticisation of feminine innocence.
The production’s decisive achievement is the Chinese soprano Leyla Gu, who gives the title role a compelling combination of vocal assurance, expressive delicacy and dramatic concentration. Her Iris is neither a conventional operatic victim nor an excessively saccharine embodiment of innocence. The character’s naivety emerges naturally, without being reduced to a succession of childish gestures, while her suffering acquires force without resorting to exaggerated histrionics.
Gu’s beautiful timbre, natural trills and command of vocal colour are especially effective in a role that requires the singer to sustain the transformation from innocent girl to violated and bewildered young woman. Her Act II “octopus aria”, “Un dì, ero piccina”, builds to a devastating climax, the vocal line gathering intensity as the disturbing erotic image at its centre acquires an increasingly sinister significance.
The episode deserves particular attention. Iris recalls a screen depicting an octopus entwining a young woman, an image associated with the Japanese erotic print tradition and famously with Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814). The image’s tentacles transform an apparently decorative object into a representation of sexual domination. It is a moment in which the opera’s Japonisme and its underlying misogyny become inseparable: the exotic image fascinates precisely because it aestheticises violence. Gu’s performance conveys the disturbing psychological implications without making the aria a mere exercise in grotesquerie.
Joseph Calleja is a compelling Osaka. The Maltese tenor, whose long association with Wexford has made him a familiar presence at the festival, built his international reputation on a bright, lyrical tenor, although his more recent assumption of heavier roles has brought a denser, more forceful vocal profile. His approach here is robust, occasionally approaching indiscriminate loudness, but the character’s hedonism, rashness and self‑confidence can accommodate a degree of vocal excess. Calleja is particularly persuasive in the celebrated “Apri la tua finestra”, whose seductive melodic appeal is among the opera’s most immediately memorable attractions.
Irish-English baritone Jolyon Loy makes an equally vivid Kyoto. His rich, dark timbre lends the character a menace that is more predatory than warmly seductive, and he moves convincingly from smooth persuasion to open intimidation. Together, Calleja and Loy supply the work with two vocally impressive villains whose differing forms of exploitation are clearly delineated: Osaka’s appetite and Kyoto’s calculating commercialism.
South Korean bass Jihoon Kim brings solidity and dignity to Il Cieco. His character is especially troubling because his paternal authority, ostensibly rooted in love, becomes an instrument of destruction. His blindness is physical, but his inability to distinguish victim from transgressor is moral. By condemning Iris, he completes the work of humiliation begun by the men who abducted her.
The supporting cast contributes effectively to the theatrical fabric, while the Wexford Festival Opera Chorus, prepared by Andrew Synnott, is particularly important to the opera’s symbolic architecture.
Francesco Cilluffo, an experienced interpreter of Mascagni whose work at Wexford has included other operas by the composer, gives the score a lyrical reading and is attentive to its larger dramatic trajectory. He shapes the music’s surges of passion with conviction, while allowing the opening and closing hymns to the sun to frame the tragedy in a broader, quasi‑religious perspective.
The difficulty is that the score does not sustain the same intensity throughout. Between its most inspired passages are stretches in which the musical argument seems to circle rather than advance. The orchestration can be sensuous and atmospheric, but its colour does not invariably translate into dramatic momentum. The effect is less one of a continuously developing psychological drama than of a sequence of tableaux, some musically ravishing, others comparatively static.
Cilluffo deserves credit for maintaining coherence across these uneven passages and for supporting the singers without obscuring their vocal lines. The orchestra responds well to his direction, and the chorus’s final contribution is particularly affecting. The return of the Hymn to the Sun, heard from the upper reaches of the opera house, acquires a radiance that the preceding drama has rendered both moving and unsettling.
For the hymn’s affirmation of life is no longer innocent. The sun that opened the opera as a symbol of natural beauty now presides over the death of a woman whom human society has failed at every turn. The music offers redemption, but the circumstances that make redemption necessary remain appalling.
Wexford’s Iris is therefore more persuasive as a theatrical and intellectual proposition than as a consistently compelling musical drama. Cucchi’s production brings the opera’s symbolic structure into focus, and Gu’s performance gives its central figure a humanity that the libretto only intermittently affords her. Cilluffo and the chorus make the most of the score’s finest passages, but they cannot wholly overcome its longueurs.
The opera’s enduring interest lies in its uneasy conjunction of beauty and cruelty. Its Japan is an imagined landscape, its heroine an idealised emblem, and its resolution a transfiguration that risks turning victimhood into spiritual consolation. Yet precisely because the production does not entirely smooth over these contradictions, Iris emerges as more than a historical curiosity. It is an imperfect but revealing experiment in the transformation of verismo into Symbolist theatre—and a reminder that the most beautiful images can conceal the ugliest forms of power.
Ossama el Naggar
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