MARK Twain would not have enjoyed the Wexford Opera Festival, with its penchant for presenting the more obscure works of well-known composers and the best-known works of nobodies, writes Frank McNally
After years of attending American operas and trying to like them, he reported mixed success. He loved the classics, because he knew all the tunes. By contrast, he found "no agony comparable to listening to an unfamiliar opera".
And he had clearly experienced much such agony, recalling countless nights of sitting through "that sort of intense but incoherent noise which always so reminds me of the time the orphan asylum burned down".
With Twain's words echoing in my ears, I decided to judge for myself last weekend. On a whim, I booked my first-ever opera tickets and headed south for Wexford's production of Tutti in Maschera - the high point in the now forgotten career of 19th-century Italian composer Carlo Pedrotti.
The evening started badly, for two reasons. Unused to opera, I made a rash judgment and wore an ordinary suit, not a dress one, ignoring my wife's warning that this would mean social death. My other faux pas was not allowing at least three-and-a-half hours to reach Wexford on a bank holiday Friday.
The tailback from Dublin to Bray was not fatal to our plans. But thereafter, the N11 unfolded like bad melodrama. Every time you thought you were in the clear, something else happened to mess up the plot. As far south as Ferns, a happy ending still seemed possible. Then the fat lady - played movingly by Enniscorthy - sang, and that was that. We were late.
In a world of hype and overstatement, nothing prepares you for the sight of Wexford Opera House. Consider the opposition. Sydney's iconic equivalent looks like a great sailing ship in a gale. By contrast, the Bastille Opera in Paris looks like an ocean liner that crashed ashore while reversing. Imposing in a different way, Milan's La Scala could be the headquarters of the world's richest bank.
Wexford's Opera House does not resemble any of these. I had been in the old building once years ago - outside show-time - and I knew its entrance was very modest and tucked away (as estate agents say) in a quiet back street.
I was fairly sure I had found that street on Friday night. But there was still no sign of the opera anywhere. So I had to ask somebody where the world-famous venue was. And sure enough, we were about 20 yards away from it. In a streetscape so low-key that it could be a film-set for small-town Ireland before the boom, the entrance to the opera house does not stand out. I've been in illegal drinking dens with flashier fronts.
That is one of the place's charms. Another is the people who staff it during the festival: mostly volunteers. Not only did none of them laugh at me for wearing the wrong clothes, or point out snootily what we knew already: that we could not be seated until the end of the first act. No. Instead, they just welcomed us warmly and ushered us into a room backstage where we could watch the show on monitor, with a glass of wine on the house.
This was an interesting experience in itself because, as well as watching, you could hear the calm backstage announcements - "Mr Romano, please, this is your call". And two minutes later, you would see Mr Romano on screen, entering from the wings into the madcap action.
There is a similar contrast, it seems to me, between opera aficionados and the object of their affections. The audience in Wexford is a bit like the portrait in the attic. You can't help wondering what such intensely respectable-looking people see in opera's wildly over-the-top stories of murder, depravity, and passions gone astray.
The biggest contrast of all, however, was the one between the humble entrance to the theatre and its magnificent interior. Entry to the old venue was dramatic enough. But the new OPW creation is like the inside of a giant pipe organ. And in keeping with this role, every sound in it reverberates.
Is this a good thing, if you're not an opera buff? Well, there were moments on Friday when the intense but incoherent noise on stage did evoke for me images of Twain's burning asylum. But I had a second glass of wine during the first interval and a third during the second interval. And by then, the whole thing was definitely beginning to make sense.
Even so, I fear it will be a long time before I can share the ardour of true opera fans. I would love to be as emotionally touched by it as - for example - the father of Chazz Palminteri's mobster-turned-artist in Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway. Palminteri: My father used to listen to the opera. He loved the opera. But if a guy stunk. . . John Cusack: What? He killed him? Palminteri (shrugging): One time, in Palermo.
Sadly, I don't foresee the Wexford bug biting me that hard soon. What I do love, though, is the idea that 50 years ago, some people in a small Irish town decided to found not just an opera festival, but one dedicated to obscure work. And they somehow made this an international success.
It's like the line in Field of Dreams: "Build it and they will come" (and eventually they will rebuild it, with world-class acoustics and better seating). For that reason alone, I'll probably be back next year.