Volume 26 Issue 8 - July and August 2021

An example: although he was forced to backtrack eventually
and commission a couple of Canadian operas, Neef repeatedly said
during his tenure that he was opposed to nationalism in the arts
as a matter of principle (and as a German man in his late 40s, let’s
assume he understands a few things about nationalism we don’t).
He hired Canadian singers for the COC, he once told me, because he
hired them when he was casting director at the Paris Opera; he hired
them because they were the best, not because they were Canadian.
When he was therefore reluctant to commission a Canadian opera,
composers in this country read the subtext, and were offended (and
then when he commissioned Rufus Wainwright finally to write
Hadrian, they were apoplectic).
But Neef gifted us so many illuminating and crystalline evenings in
the opera house, to me, it was all worth it. I think especially of the two
Peter Sellars productions Neef presented here, a Tristan and Isolde
with astonishing videos by Bill Viola, (and the return of Ben Heppner
to a COC stage after an inexplicable 17-year absence) and Sellars’
Hercules, a Handel opera transposed to the American experience in
Iraq. We saw work by Robert Carsen, the Alden brothers, David and
Christopher, and the remarkable Don Giovanni of Dmitri Tcherniakov.
And the voices! Neef let us hear Sondra Radvanovsky as Queen
Elizabeth and Norma, Christine Goerke as Brunhilde (before the Met
heard her), Isabel Leonard as Sesto, Gerald Finley as Falstaff, Ferruccio
Furlanetto as Don Quichotte and many others. We got to see and hear
opera on the highest international level of performance for a decade.
Was all of it brilliant? No. Was all of it successful? No, Did all of it fill
houses? Quite the contrary. Was all of it worth it? For this operagoer,
yes – a thousand times yes.
On the other hand, “the purpose of the theatre is to be full,” Neef
himself once told me, quoting Giuseppe Verdi; with declining audience
figures, and slightly anemic philanthropic numbers at the end
of Neef’s tenure, perhaps it was understandable that the board of
the COC decided a slightly different approach was necessary in the
next phase of the institution’s life. They, after all, unlike me, have to
balance budgets, worry about fundraising, fret over community partnerships,
manage a company. I just got to go to the Four Seasons
Centre for a decade and more, more often than not to come away
dazzled, uplifted, changed – seized by art, the way art is supposed to
seize you, but which it does so rarely in the world. That we could be so
grabbed by the collar and shaken loose, and then, when it was done,
still hop on the subway at Osgoode or the King car, was an especial
treat, a homegrown treasure.
This is why I, for one, am thankful every day that Alexander Neef
stopped here for a time – a good round dozen years, by the way, so hardly
an opportunistic sojourn – and I hope he stands up to the rigours of a
Ben Heppner and Melanie Diener in Tristan und Isolde, 2013
hyper-everything French cultural hothouse. Somehow I think he will.
I hope, as well, that the path he led us on remains clear and potent
for the COC, and doesn’t get overgrown with the innumerable
compromising weeds that are the bane of true art the world over.
Robert Harris is a writer and broadcaster on music in all its forms.
He is the former classical music critic of The Globe and Mail and the
author of The Stratford Lectures and Song of a Nation: The Untold
Story of O Canada.
MICHAEL COOPER
Meet the creators behind the words of Canadian opera
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FEATURING:
Beatrice Chancy by George Elliott Clarke
Dog Days by Royce Vavrek
Missing by Marie Clements
Nigredo Hotel by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Ours by Robert Chafe
Rocking Horse Winner by Anna Chatterton
Shelter by Julie Salverson
PLUS interviews, essays,
illustrations, and photos from
composers, designers,
directors, scholars, and more!
Available from playwrightscanada.com or
your favourite local bookstore for $29.95.
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