CUMS-SMUC

Analysis of the various programmes offered by the Canada Council for the Arts reveals that government financial aid is not sufficient to allow for the consistent creation of operatic works. This is further borne out by studies of the operations of various professional organisations that benefit from these programmes (including professional and university workshops), as well as all the mechanisms that surround the premiere of a new opera (from its commissioning to its first staging). In sum, most of the funds are used to meet operating costs of the country’s various operatic organisations. In order for Canadian opera to thrive, composers must turn to lyrical companies and not opera houses.

The opera Barnardo Boys, with music by Clifford Crawley and libretto by David Helwig, was premiered in Kingston, Ontario in May 1982. Inspired by the example of Benjamin Britten, the creators of the opera regarded community involvement and cooperation between amateurs and professionals as essential to the production of the work. There was only one imported professional singer in the cast—Jan Rubes, who was hired to play the lead role of Albert Ashby. Both the libretto and the music of the opera make use of a combination of pre-existing and newly created source materials. This approach is seen to be typical of a Canadian preference for the genre of documentary opera, which parallels an engagement with historical fiction on the part of Canadian novelists.

In R. Murray Schafer’s Patria cycle (1966–), movement, both choreographed and improvisational—to the performance, between spaces within the performance, and within the fabrication of the performance—allows the audience to actively participate. These in-between spaces of movement are as much performance space as is the final site of the production, extending the performance beyond the confines of the theatre. Drawing on examples from The Princess of the Stars, The Enchanted Forest, and The Greatest Show, this article examines two states of in-betweenness: first, the pilgrimage to the performance, and second, the pathways that link performance experiences.

Why was Mozart’s duet, “Crudel! perchè finora” (Le Nozze di Figaro, III (i)) among the operatic excerpts sung by amateur and professional musicians at Mrs. Widder’s private Toronto soirée musicale? Typically Victorian, the formal programme for this musical party mixed opera with glees, popular ballads, and instrumental music, but the Mozart duet is rarely found on such programmes. The British hostess may have relied on her socially prominent audience in colonial Canada to recognize that her concert echoed the programming practices of London (England), as she positioned the concert to support her husband’s politically-sensitive land development plans. This example of trans-Atlantic culture suggests that Victorian amateur concert programmes are useful sources for audience reception history.

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