Opera Viva: Canadian Opera Company – The First Fifty Years by Ezra Schabas, Carl Morey (review)

HUMANITIES 333 gradually diversified. Also crucial was the umbilical relationship with Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories, initially the sole supplier of that isotope and whose production problems affected CPD. In spite of a few missteps, such as the short and unsuccessful foray into the production of linear accelerators, CPD thrived and was an attractive target for privatization by the 1990s. Adjudged to be one of Canada=s fifty best-managed companies, it provided a striking example of the success of government enterprise in the high technology sector. The history of MDS Nordion is very much the history of Roy Errington, who had begun it with a handful of employees and led it for about half the time of its existence. Litt rightly gives him an important place in his book, although the reader sometimes wonders about the precise nature of Errington=s achievements: A good salesman? Adept or lucky in maintaining harmonious relations with the rest of AECL? Technologically far-sighted? A financial appendix with information that went beyond the odd chart that appears in the book on CPD=s sources of revenue and expenses would not have been out of place in this corporate history. A quick overview of the international competition that went beyond the useful listing in an appendix of foreign companies in the same business would have given more relief to the portrait of MDS Nordion. These quibbles do not detract from the main achievement of this book: raising the profile of a unique and highly successful Canadian competitor in the global market-place of high technology while reminding us that there is an often ignored and humane aspect to nuclear technology. (JANIS LANGINS) Ezra Schabas and Carl Morey. Opera Viva: Canadian Opera Company B The First Fifty Years Dundurn Press. 312. $49.99 This is a handsome book that belongs on both the coffee table and the reference shelf. The history of Toronto=s Canadian Opera Company is told in words, pictures, and appendices, the whole supplied with useful bibliography and index. This is the story of a tremendous success, since Canada has never had the preconditions for building an opera company enjoyed by many European countries: royal or princely patronage, a hired claque, and an operaphile population. Indeed, the social reality of Toronto even as late as the 1940s and 1950s is well described thus: >Toronto=s staid citizenry [was characterized by their] resistance to the new and the different, and their view of opera as an alien art.= The puritanical views of the very people who could provide financial support and their suspicion of the definitely non-puritanical subject matter of many operas were enormous obstacles to founding a permanent opera company in Ontario, in spite of the success of the many touring companies which had provided opera to 334 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 the province for more than one hundred years. The one strong asset the new enterprise would be able to count on was the CBC, dedicated as it was to providing high-quality radio using Canadian artists. It took the combined energies and abilities (including charm!) of three central European immigrants to Canada to accomplish what they didn=t know couldn=t be done: build a school of opera and a permanent opera company in >Toronto the Good.= This trio, Arnold Walter, Nicholas Goldschmidt , and Herman Geiger-Torel, were either born or had worked in Czechoslovakia. Where a polite English Protestant would know it was not >nice= to push for what you wanted, a Czech musician would know it was suicide not to. A glance at the biographies of their national composers, Smetana (1824B84) and Janacek (1854B1928), whose operas are well represented in the fifty-one COC seasons which have now transpired, will show a spirit of triumph over adversity which would inspire any young twentieth-century Czech musician. The example of Prague as an opera centre could serve as the ideal to be emulated. The continuing development of the Canadian Opera company through the tenures of Lotfi Mansouri, Brian Dickie, and Richard Bradshaw is told with honesty, as promised in the foreword: >Our work is not hagiography.= The behind-the-scenes story of relationships between imported direction and artists and...