Unheard Of: Memoirs of a Canadian Composer

12. Operas

12 Operas I n my early teens I became an opera buff through listening to the live radio broadcasts every Saturday morning from the Metropolitan in New York.1 I subscribed to Opera News and, with its illustrations in front of me, would try to visualize the performance I was hearing. Occasionally I borrowed a vocal score from the public library and followed it while listening. Opera was a special medium, and the Met was a special company, or so the unctuously voiced announcements told you (Milton Cross, Edward Johnson, and those New York society women with their upper-crust accents, Mrs August Belmont, Mrs DeWitt Peltz, and the rest). The singing was marvellous, and the standard repertoire was a musical storybook full of riches. Once I even wrote a fan letter to Kirsten Flagstad, promising her I would one day compose an opera. This adolescent dream episode came into my memory in 2007 when I heard Tan Dun confess to an interviewer that he had often fantasized writing an opera for Plácido Domingo—little imagining, etcetera—but here was the Met premiere of his The First Emperor, starring none other than Domingo. Experience has made me a skeptic on the star system and on the notion that opera’s specialness is associated with class. My love of the medium was deepened through involvements in the inaugural seasons of the Canadian Opera Company in the late 1940s, before it assumed that name. I was a rehearsal pianist for Gluck’s Orfeo, Herman Geiger-Torel’s first show on his appointment as stage director. As publicity officer for the Royal Conservatory, I designed flyers and wrote news releases and program synopses for the earliest productions in Eaton Auditorium and the Royal Alexandra Theatre. In the early 1950s I again served as coach and répétiteur, when among my assignments was 245 a Così fan tutte with Mary Morrison, Sylvia Grant, Jon Vickers, and Don Garrard. Furthering my ambition to compose an opera, I had the great good luck to find a librettist—a writer who understood music. James Reaney shared my love of opera, and early in our friendship in student days we spoke of perhaps collaborating on an original work. In early 1953 I received from him a draft of Night Blooming Cereus.This one-act opera he imagined taking shape as a sort of southern Ontario miracle play. It turned out to be the first of four operatic works we produced together over succeeding decades, alongside about a dozen other words-and-music ventures that could be termed semi-operatic. This output has been a central concern of my creative life and I recognize how much I owe to Jamie for the stimulus of these pieces and for their focus on Canadian images and issues, a significant influence in other areas of my work.2 246 • compositions My decoration for the title page of the piano/vocal score of Night Blooming Cereus (1958). Composing an opera, even a one-act opera, is a commitment of time. In the 1950s I was under pressure from income-producing work, and there were no opera commissions, so I worked slowly and in spare moments. Completing the first of Night Blooming Cereus’s three scenes, I wrote to Reaney (then living in Winnipeg) that the libretto needed trimming ; it was getting too long. I also asked him for more metrical variety. He obliged with revisions, and I plowed ahead with the second scene, again working at it only when time permitted. On turning thirty, I complained in a letter to Marvin Duchow of how long the opera was taking: “I didn’t expect it to become a ‘life’s work,’” is how I remember expressing my frustration. In 1958 I decided to risk taking the whole summer off. With my young family I went to Victoria for a couple of months and concentrated on composing the remaining (longer) scene and writing out the orchestration. Pamela and I played and sang the whole score to a group of friends just before we left to return to Toronto. Night Blooming Cereus calls for eight singers and an instrumental ensemble of fourteen players, and lasts about sixty minutes. The dimensions , scaled down from the requirements of the grand opera stage, resembled those of the operas Benjamin Britten was then composing for his English Opera Group. The image of the flower that blooms...