Dublin's Dumb Wife

The harp that once through Tara's halls The soul of music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls As if that soul were fled.

For Dublin's shy, serious Composer Gerard Victory, 31, Ireland's harp has been silent too long. Ireland has a single professional symphony, a host of amateur choral societies which stick pretty closely to Handel's Messiah and Haydn's Creation, two opera societies which import stars for about seven weeks a year of old-fashioned grand opera, a green countryside full of amateur balladeers, and that is about all. Composer Victory decided to do something about it, last week unveiled in Dublin the world's first opera in Gaelic.

It was called An Fear a Phos Balbhan (The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife), a one-act farce adapted from Rabelais by Librettist Tomas Mac Anna. In a surrealistic setting showing both the inside and outside of a peasant's cottage, the hero hires a doctor to cure his speechless wife. The doctor does this by telling her of her husband's carryings-on with other women. When she finally speaks, she does it so abusively that the hero asks to be made deaf, and the curtain falls as he peacefully sings that deafness is the cure for all troubles.

It was a boisterous holiday audience that saw the opening night, happy to have somewhere to go during An Tostal, the first Welcome-to-Ireland festival, even if it meant sampling a new opera in a less-than-fully-familiar language. But Dublin enjoyed the spiky modern harmonies played by the twelve-piece orchestra, and roared its delight at the slapstick on the stage. It looked as if the show would sell out for its whole week's run.

Victory's work was the result of some hard thinking about opera in Ireland. Grandiose 19th century operas, he says, "require a large team of people, all of a high standard vocally, which you won't find in a small country, working together as a balanced team, which you certainly won't find in Ireland." He feels that the solution lies in realistic, small-cast operas whose vocal parts can be mastered by nonoperatic singers. His models for Balbhan were Menotti's The Consul and The Telephone. He chose Gaelic because it "suits comedy and character singing better than English, and there is a wider range of sounds available."

Composer Victory is a producer for the Irish State Radio, musical director for the

Abbey Theater's Christmas pantomimes, and has written several musical comedies. But Irish opera is his big interest. Some day, he hopes, the harp will come down off the wall for good.

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