Will Hadrian conquer?
More than a decade in the making, this summer the Canadian Opera Company fine-tunes its biggest and riskiest creative venture in two decades. In October, the curtain goes up on the world premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s Hadrian, the first full-length commission the company has presented as part of its mainstage season since Randolph Peters’ The Golden Ass in 1999. Both works are stories of ancient Rome, both are inspired by literature (Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian) and both have prominent Canadian writers as librettists (the late Robertson Davies and Daniel MacIvor). But beyond the incidental similarities, the two operas are worlds apart in subject matter and musical temperament, and the company arguably has much more riding on this latest venture. “The challenge of any new opera is that it will always be part of a season of masterworks,” says COC General Director Alexander Neef. “We made a deliberate, out-of-the-box decision. In picking Rufus as the composer, it was a risk that we incurred.”
After years of fielding criticism that the COC has a weak record of championing Canadian work, Neef has committed to move the company to a regime in which it stages a home-made piece every other year. But when he went public with the all-Canadian commission late in 2013, there were howls of outrage. “How do we scale the wall of misguided thinking behind Canadian Opera Company’s ?” music critic and blogger John Terauds asked in a widely’s. Composer John Beckwith was more colourful in his dismissal: “The commission suggests a risk comparable to hiring someone to remove your tonsils who is not a qualified member of the College of Physicians.”
