Opera lovers, who make the annual pilgrimage to the fishing port town of Wexford on Ireland's south-east coast for the opera festival specializing in forgotten works, are like detectorists on a treasure hunt.
Like the metal seekers systematically scanning the ground for hidden valuables with their devices, the audience also hopes to stumble upon operatic gold in the little gem of a theater built into the middle of the rows of fishermen's houses.
With varying degrees of success.
In retrospect, it is always amazing how many now established works by Donizetti, Verdi, Massenet, Janáček or Rossini, for example, the small festival in this unlikely place has paved the way to international stages in the seventy years since its founding, and how many later stars have already done so in Wexford before they became world famous.
Gina Thomas
Features correspondent based in London.
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This time the search in the archives of operatic literature brought to light three works for the main programme.
Wexford has grouped them under the theme of 'Magic and Music', with the theme of the exotic 'other' or orientalism perhaps more aptly characterizing the selection.
Jacques Fromental Halévy's “La Tempesta” based on Eugène Scribe's adaptation of Shakespeare's “Storm” kicked things off in a co-production with the Teatro Coccia in Novara, Piedmont.
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was originally intended to set the libretto to music.
However, he turned down the commission, not least because he disliked Scribe's reductive corruption of Shakespeare.
And so the choice fell on Halévy.
Prejudices?
But not the English!
His "Tempesta" is a European mongrel: English poet, French librettist, French composer, premiered in London in 1850 in Italian in the style of Italian opera, with the effort of the Parisian "Grand opéra".
The London audience was enthusiastic, and the critics mostly praised it.
However, Scribe's free handling of The Tempest reinforced the British prejudice that the French should not be trusted with Shakespeare.
In Scribe, the princely magician Prospero becomes a marginal figure.
Instead, his daughter Miranda and the desires of the natural man Caliban, who has been shaken by him, are brought into focus for her.
A magazine published a satirical recipe for an Avon swan, as Shakespeare is known, with instructions
to repeatedly boil and cool the dismembered bird until the pieces were thoroughly broken up.
"To be served hot to an enlightened audience who will be delighted that a French chef has made such a splendid fricassee of his beloved Avon swan." all forty operas by Halévy except for "La Juive".