Pietro Mascagni's Iris

The sun may shine equally upon paupers and kings, but life does not deal out such an even hand to the powerful and the disenfranchised. Pietro Mascagni’s Iris, with a libretto by Luigi Illica, pulls at the heartstrings, but despite its fairytale ending, this is a dark fable in which female innocence and beauty are snuffed out by male greed, lust and pride.

This was the fourth performance of Iris at Wexford Opera Festival’s 75th edition, and cast, chorus, creative team and orchestra were all perfectly attuned to director Rosetta Cucchi’s vision. In contrast to Mascagni’s lush and richly orchestrated score, Cucchi’s visually sensuous staging accentuates the grim reality of the libretto.

Set in a mythical Japan, Iris (soprano Leyla Gu) lives with her blind father (bass Jihoon Kim) in a rural idyll outside Edo (old Tokyo). Besotted with her dolls and in awe of the beauty and power of nature, the naïve, beautiful young Iris attracts the attention of playboy Osaka (tenor Joseph Calleja) and the pimp Kyoto (baritone Jolyon Loy). Eyeing Iris with cold calculation, Kyoto tells Osaka to consider her his “plaything.”

Under the guise of a travelling puppet show, Kyoto and Osaka kidnap Iris and take her to the red-light district of Yoshiwara to meet her fate.

Impressive though the principals uniformly are, the emotional impact of this Wexford Opera Festival production resides as much in the set design (Tiziano Santi), costumes (Claudia Pernigotti), video design (Thomas Achitz), choreography (Libby Seward) and lighting (Daniele Naldi), all sympathetic to the undulating contours of the drama.

Symbolism abounds. Dolls represent innocence, masks deception and dehumanisation. The Yoshiwara sex workers, caged like hens, are Irises one and all. Faces garishly painted, white dresses stained with virginal blood, they clutch their dolls as they flinch from Kyoto’s rough hands and threatening bark.

Trafficking and sexual exploitation provide the framework for Iris’s descent into hell—a modern reality for millions globally that makes Mascagni’s opera as relevant today as it was when it premiered in Rome in 1898.

Ravishing set pieces provide a feast for the senses. Particularly striking is the darkly carnivalesque puppet show in Act 1, led by Dhia (soprano Hanna O’Brien), with its witchy dancers, animal costumes, and grotesque faces projected large upon the stage walls. Aerialist Hannah Scully’s acrobatics on red silk curtains seems to reflect Iris’s touching naivety in believing that Dhia is not dying but ascending “to the land of the sun.”

There is less movement in Act 2, with Iris now a prisoner in a golden cage in the Yoshiwara brothel. Less bustle, but no let-up in the nightmare. Calleja’s potent aria “Or dammi il braccio tuo,” as he takes a confused and terrified Iris in his arms, is musically thrilling but a hard watch.

In her disorientation, Iris mistakes her reality for a dream. But not for long. Ogled, pawed at, publicly displayed and threatened with death if she does not conform, the truth of her plight soon dawns. The insults of her father, who has followed her to the brothel in anger, believing Iris to have abandoned him for a life of sin, prove too much for her gentle soul to bear. She throws herself into a dark pit. Gu (“Un dì—ero piccina—al tempio”) and Kim (“To’, sul tuo viso!”) are compelling in their respective torment.

In the third and final act, rag pickers sift through the detritus surrounding an open sewer. In an original, though deeply unsettling piece of choreography, the sewer is strewn with the bodies of young women for whom the sun will shine no more. Alerted by something glittering, the rag pickers scramble feverishly and uncover a semi-conscious Iris. They strip her of her finery before fleeing as she stirs. Railing against her cruel fate, the impressive Gu delivers a moving rendition of “Perché? Perché?” Abused and abandoned, Iris finds solace in the rising sun as she dies.

As it did at the beginning, Mascagni’s magnificent sun chorus (“Son lo la vita!”), stirringly delivered by the Wexford Festival Opera Chorus under Andrew Synnott, closes the opera in spectacular fashion, as Iris rises from the filth towards the rays of the sun.

It is tempting to read this epic finale as a celestial ascension, a heart-warming redemption of sorts. The bitter fact remains, however, that Iris’s horrendous ordeal—trafficked into prostitution, rejected by her father and dying alone in a sewer—is a truer reflection of her existence.

If Mascagni’s inventive, complex music, composed over two and a half years of painstaking work, falls short of mirroring the horror of Iris’s ordeal, Cucchi’s bold staging, visceral and visually stunning, does not. Her direction, the work of a wonderful creative team and an electrifying central performance from Gu elevate a simple melodrama populated by fairly one-dimensional characters, to the realm of the sublime.