'This music crept by me upon the waters': Colm Tóibín on Wexford Festival Opera
A history of Wexford Festival Opera.
Wexford has a strange beauty in the washed light of late October. The town still looks like a medieval port, with narrow streets leading from the quays to a single long main street, also narrow. Wexford got its name from the Vikings, but its tone was set by the Normans. Half the surnames of the people are Norman, and in the plainness of the architecture, and the lack of pretension in the citizens, there is a Norman austerity. The other elements include not only the Gaelic, but also the English and Huguenot.
