Reviving a lost masterpiece

A rediscovered opera by Welsh greats Arwel Hughes and Saunders Lewis will be the centrepiece of this year’s Musicfest in Aberystwyth. The festival's artistic director Iwan Davies tells Jenny White how it came about

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TICKETS are on sale now for this summer’s Musicfest in Aberystwyth, which will see more than a dozen concerts and recitals staged in the town from Saturday, July 26, to Saturday, August 2.

A centrepiece of this year’s offering will be a staging of a lost musical masterpiece by composer Arwel Hughes with words by playwright Saunders Lewis, which was rediscovered by the festival's artistic director Iwan Davies as part of his studies into Welsh opera.

Serch yw’r Doctor (Love is the Doctor) is based on Molière’s comedy drama L'Amour médecin. This performance, conducted by Davies and performed by the Welsh National Opera’s orchestra, with leading soloists Fflur Wyn, Robert Lewis, Paul Carey Jones, Steffan Lloyd Owen and Sioned Gwen Davies, will be only the second time the opera has been staged since it was first aired at the National Eisteddfod in Cardiff in 1960.

Davies, who, among other things, is a professional opera conductor and head of music at the Buxton International Festival, discovered the lost opera while researching for his PhD in Welsh operas in Welsh and English written since the formation of the Welsh National Opera. As his research went on, he decided to narrow his remit to focus on the first two such operas, both of which were written by Arwel Hughes.

Serch yw’r Doctor is one of these, and it particularly interested Davies because the libretto was written by Lewis, one of the great Welsh writers and political figures of the last century.

“The fact that he'd written an opera libretto at all was interesting, and the more I looked into it, the more I realised that the libretto hadn’t been studied by anyone,” says Davies. “Lots has been written about his plays and poems and life, but somehow the libretto falls between the cracks, because it’s not a play and it’s not a poem, but it has elements of both.”