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7. North of the Border
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• 7 • North of the Border I n early 1974, I was contacted by Dr. Herman Geiger-Torel, general director of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, Ontario. Although I had already directed two productions in Vancouver, in 1967 and 1968, I wasn’t quite sure where Toronto was, what people did there, or what it might be good for. It had never shown up on my operatic radar screen. I thought Canada was populated by colorfully uniformed Mounties, intrepid hockey players, and peacekeepers. Somebody told me Canadians kept beavers as house pets, but that was about it. I was in San Francisco, directing a production, and after a long rehearsal and a pleasant cocktail evening, I didn’t get to bed until two or three in the morning. The phone rang around 7:00 a.m. Pacific time. Through my grogginess, I heard someone with a slight German accent introduce himself as Dr. Geiger-Torel. I couldn’t quite place him until he said we had met at various operatic events. He paid me a couple of compliments, then he got to the point. “I have something very confidential to ask you.” He told me he was getting ready to retire in Toronto, and the company was looking for a successor. He felt I would be a suitable candidate. He was very formal, very European, and I was so sleepy I could have agreed to anything just to get back to bed, so I said yes, and later I received formal notice that I had been added to the list. Hermann Berthold Gustav Geiger was a remarkable gentleman with an amazing background. Like Dr. Graf, he had been raised in an artloving Jewish home, the son of pianist-composer Rosy Geiger-Kullmann, a pupil of Carl Schuricht. At an early age, despite the usual family objections , he decided he would make music, in one form or another, his life. Being fond of theater as well, he thought perhaps stage direction was North of the Border { 109 his thing. At the age of eighteen, he made the acquaintance of one of the giants of our craft, the Austrian director Lothar Wallerstein, who at the time was codirector of the Frankfurt Opera. Wallerstein brought him as his assistant to the Salzburg Festival, helping put artists like Lotte Lehmann through their paces. When the Nazis took over Germany, he was able to secure an engagement at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, where he worked with the great Erich Kleiber. After a couple of further European engagements in Czechoslovakia and France, where he changed his name to Herman Geiger-Torel, he was able to get out of Europe and resettle in South America, first continuing his work at the Colón, then founding an opera company in Uruguay, eventually moving on as principal stage director in Rio de Janeiro. He first came to Canada in 1948, where plans were under way to form an opera company in Toronto as an adjunct to the Royal Conservatory. He would have enjoyed sticking around, but commitments in South America drew him back to the continent on the other side of the Equator. He then continued on to New York, where he again worked with Dr. Wallerstein, now both a stage director and drama teacher at the Metropolitan Opera. In 1949, Felix Brentano, another Austrian émigré based in New York, was directing a production of Orfeo ed Euridice in Toronto and needed somebody to stage the dances. He asked Geiger-Torel if he would act as choreographer. Geiger-Torel had never done any dance staging in his life, but he saw no reason why he shouldn’t add another arrow to his quiver, and so he tripped the light fantastic back to Canada. The following year, Felix Brentano had so many commitments in the United States directing opera that he resigned from his Canadian activities , and Geiger-Torel was brought back as stage director. A festival in 1950 marked the company’s coming of age. The opera organization separated from the Conservatory, and nine years later, the Canadian Opera Company appointed Geiger-Torel general director. His company began national tours, traveling some ten thousand miles a year and pioneering operatic productions over the length and breadth of the world’s second-largest country. The productions’ strength and reputation increased from season to season, while Dr. Geiger-Torel’s operating deficits grew along with them. Unlike the few companies in the United States in those days, opera...