A HISTORY OF OPERA IN CANADA 1960-2020
After World War Two, cultural critics looked at how the world had changed and announced that many traditional art forms had become outmoded. Figurative art was dead. The literary novel was dead. All of classical music was dead. The genre of classical music whose demise was deemed most obvious was opera.
The death of opera became such a cliché of cultural criticism that in 1950 American opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti was moved to counter the naysayers in his essay “Opera Isn’t Dead.” The argument of the naysayers was that American opera houses had become nothing more than living museums of 19th-century works and that the form had not put down any roots in American soil. As it happens, the 1950s saw a major boom of homegrown opera by important American composers, from Samuel Barber to Virgil Thomson.
If we turn our gaze to Canada in 1950, the question might not be “Is opera dead?” but rather “Was opera ever alive?” Yes, Québécois composer Joseph Quesnel wrote the first Canadian opera with hisColas et Colinette (1788). Yes, Ontarian composer Oscar Telgmann’s operetta Leo, the Royal Cadet (1889) not only toured Ontario and New York state, but recorded over 1,700 performances before 1925. Yet neither of these works led to an increase of opera composition nor to the founding of permanent professional opera companies.
In 1947, Robertson Davies’s comic play Overlaid depicted a farmer somewhere in “rural Canada” who combats the supposed “emotional undernourishment” of his compatriots by listening to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts from The Metropolitan Opera. The play reflects the reality that in the mid-20th century, Canadian opera-lovers had to look outside the country for sustenance. Davies’s farmer, however, was not as alone in his thinking. The success of the Met broadcasts in Canada, and of the Met’s tours of Canadian cities on and off from 1941 to 1967, demonstrated that there really was a large and eager audience for opera in Canada. This perception in turn encouraged certain singers and music educators to dream that professional opera companies might at last become viable in this country.
There was only one such company in Canada in 1947 when Davies’ play premiered. In 1941, soprano Pauline Donalda founded the Opera Guild of Montréal which lasted until was established, the number had grown to three. In addition to the Opera Guild of Montréal was the new Vancouver Opera, founded in 1958 by tenor William Morton, which gave its first performance in 1960. Yet the oldest continually running opera company in Canada would be the Canadian Opera Company, founded in 1950 by three members of the Royal Conservatory of Music—German émigré Herman Geigel-Torel and Moravian émigrés Arnold Walter and Nicholas Goldschmidt. They established the Royal Conservatory Opera Company as a showcase for Canadian singers, a company that after a series of name changes would evolve into the Canadian Opera Company.
