By Andrew Clark [Financial Times 1 November 2005]

The most interesting decade for Italian opera was not the 1820s, when Rossini was at his zenith, nor the 1850s, when Verdi became the dominant force. No, it was the 1840s, when the old decorative conventions gave way to a modern, through- composed type of drama. We owe it to the Wexford festival these past few years for profiling this trend.