Volume 29 Issue 2 | October & November 2023

ON OPERA
VISIONS AND
REVISIONS
The balancing
act SOPHIA PERLMAN
Rocking Horse remount: tenor Asitha Tennekoon
reprises his role as the childlike Paul.
DAHLIA KATZ
This time last year, the opera community was
celebrating as companies large and small started to
announce their first “normal” year of programming.
Even as live performance began creeping back after
the initial lockdowns, opera presenters struggled to
balance reduced seating capacities and ticket sales,
and shutdown-related revenue loss with the budgets
needed to mount full scale productions – especially those
presenters whose audiences have grown accustomed to
productions with full operatic scale.
Now, artistic directors and creative teams have a new balancing
act to manage – “making up for lost time” against getting “back on
track” with creative plans that are often created three or five years
in advance. This with the age-old challenge any opera (or music)
presenter faces in any normal season: how to balance the need for
familiar, fan-favourite productions, (which are good for ticket sales),
with the desire or mandate to present lesser- known works, or
commission new operas and productions from composers and directors
who continue to move the art form forward.
We sometimes tend to think of opera as a very formalized and set
tradition, but but it has built into it a long history of “revising the
creative plan” – by directors who recontextualize historical works to
reflect contemporary issues; by artists and opera organizations who
continue to refine, evolve and build the way that opera is created and
performed; and sometimes by composers themselves, of their own
volition. All facets of this visioning and revisioning are on display this
fall in Toronto’s opera community.
The Canadian Opera Company has long used the model of
co-producing with other companies to share the substantial costs
of creating and producing large-scale productions. They also pair
their operas strategically – running something well-known to audiences,
or remounting a successful past production concurrently with
something lesser known, or occasionally more contemporary or
most often, significantly restaged and reinterpreted. This is beautifully
illustrated by their first pairing of operas this fall: Puccini’s La
Bohème and Beethoven’s Fidelio, opening Sept 29 and Oct 6 respectively.
Puccini (and Bohème) are sure-fire winners here. Bohème was in
the COC’s very first season (before the company even had its current
name). Since 2008, there have been four productions of that Puccini
opera alone. Add Tosca and Madama Butterfly to the mix, and it’s not
surprising that there have been only six seasons since 2008 where the
company didn’t present one of Puccini’s works.
Beethoven’s music is arguably to classical music audiences what
Puccini is to opera, but Beethoven only wrote one opera, so it’s been
a 15-year wait for fans of his beautiful Fidelio. After 1805 when it first
premiered, he wrote three separate new overtures for it, quibbled with
producers about several iterations of the final title, and in 1814 when
the final version premiered, swore he would never write another one.
On his deathbed, he spoke of the work saying “of all my children, this
is the one that cost me the worst birth-pangs, the one that brought me
the most sorrow; and for that reason it is the one most dear to me.”
While Fidelio doesn’t make the rotation as regularly as some works,
its themes of loyalty and justice have meant that it tends to re-emerge at
times of political and global turmoil, re-visioned through a compelling
contemporary lens. Director Matthew Ozawa embraces the legacy and
seizes the opportunity with both hands, in this new co-production with
San Francisco Opera. Originally set in a prison, and originally inspired
by the French Revolution (contemporary to Beethoven’s time), this
modern re-imagining sets the story in a “undisclosed detention centre
in the near past or near future,” and is rooted in the resonances Ozawa
found in the material: images he was seeing in 2018 of detention centres
in the US and elsewhere – including repurposed Japanese internment
camps like the one where his father was born during World War II.
The design uses levels, fences and screens to show the hierarchies and
bureaucratic machinery involved in imprisoning and silencing people.
A scene from Fidelio, San Francisco Opera, 2021
CORY WEAVER
24 | October & November 2023 thewholenote.com