The Sermon from the Mount: The Messages in the Canadian Opera Company’s Remount of the Riel Opera

The Canadian Opera Company chose Canada’s centennial to commission and mount a new Canadian opera – Louis Riel. It chose to remount the opera fifty years later for Canada’s sesquicentennial. This article explores this curious choice by discussing three themes: (1) the tension that results from using the highly stylized Western medium of opera to tell the story of an Indigenous leader, Louis Riel; (2) the opera’s plot, which justifies the state execution and, in so doing, exonerates Canada; and (3) the message conveyed by the choice to mount an opera with such a plot in order to celebrate Canada’s centennial and sesquicentennial.