Mr. Meek Goes to Washington: The Story of the Small-Potatoes Canadian Baritone Who Founded America's "National" Opera

When talk turns to tales of the U.S. capital, everyone knows about the eighteen-minute gap in that notorious Watergate tape. But few know about the eighteen-year gap in the city's musical annals that embraced the rise and fall of the Washington National Opera Company, a largely homemade-by-loving-hands affair that, between 1919 and 1936,² presented ninety-odd performances of nearly thirty works by twenty composers in ten wildly disparate venues—stability was never the organization's strong suit.

In the beginning, those performances were almost exclusively the province of local amateurs, from whose enthusiastic ranks the company continued to draw the bulk of its orchestra, chorus, and small-part singers throughout its brief and precarious existence. Later, thanks to the sympathetic support of D.C. society, management was occasionally able to cast principal roles with such big-league guest stars as Mabel Garrison, Jeanne Gordon, Louise Homer, Edith Mason, Pasquale Amato, George Baklanov, Edward Johnson, and Titta Ruffo.

But what makes the hitherto undocumented productions of the Washington National Opera of more than casual interest is the number of times this minor hand-to-mouth operation managed to make history, achieving a remarkable record of "firsts" long lost in the oblivion to which its efforts have been consigned for nearly seventy years. Although credit for some of the following milestones is traditionally accorded others, it was in fact this enterprising little troupe on the Potomac that was responsible for:

• Fedor Chaliapin's first appearance in opera in Washington, the cause for a lively tempest in a teapot (or perhaps samovar) with an irate Chicago Civic Opera.
• John Charles Thomas's first appearance in opera anywhere.
• The genial baritone's first American appearances on returning home from initial success abroad, fully two years before the Philadelphia engagement routinely cited.
• A 1926 Queen of Spades—in Russian yet—featuring famed tenor Dmitri Smirnov in what were almost assuredly his only post-1912 U.S. stage performances.
• Mary Lewis's first and apparently last traversal of Thaïs, an event now so veiled by the mists of time that even the glamorous soprano's biographer appears unaware of it.
• A 1928 Die Walküre marking Johanna Gadski's return to the American opera stage, eleven years after banishment from the Met in the anti-German hysteria of World War I.
• The American premiere of Vaughan Williams's Hugh the Drover, with Eugene Goossens conducting a cast headed by London's original Hugh, Tudor Davies.
• Bidú Sayão's U.S. opera debut, an occasion so plagued by disaster that few if any of her admirers are even aware of it—certainly, the lady herself seems prudently to have avoided any mention of the subject through the remaining six decades of her long life.

These and other feathers rose proudly (save perhaps for the Sayão debacle) from the cap of one man, Washington National founder and general director Edouard Albion, an amiable visionary whose selfless dedication to the cause—he drew no salary through all the years of the company's activities—has gone unnoticed by posterity to the extent that even basic biographical facts about him cannot be found in any available reference source. Of course, it helps to know that efforts to rectify the situation at this late date would be doomed to failure for one good and simple reason: there was no such person.

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Some eighty choppy miles north of Cleveland, Ohio, on the Canadian side of Lake Erie, sits the village of Port Stanley, Ontario, where, on 24 March 1887, a certain Thomas Harold Meek became the fourth generation of his family to inhabit land bought from the "Baron of Lake Erie" himself, Colonel Thomas Talbot, the whisky-swilling Irish eccentric who had opened the area to settlement...