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Opera has many heroes; few of them are found in orchestra pits. Richard Bradshaw came to the Canadian Opera Company in 1989 in a supporting role, but by the time he died on Wednesday night, he had become a hero in the opera community and in his adopted city of Toronto.

He was the kind of figure that many arts organizations see only once, a master builder who raised his company to a permanently higher level. His monument stands on a busy corner in downtown Toronto, where the opera house he dreamed of for two decades opened scarcely a year ago.

All this past year, the company's first season in the new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Bradshaw's entry into the pit on performance nights became a ritual moment for the audience, which never failed to give him a long, loud ovation. I'm sure that as someone who knew the ups and downs of a life in the theatre, he was both flattered and amused to be cheered before a single note had been played.

He was a man of large appetites and tremendous spirit, who in our last extended conversations told me that the only irresponsible option in art was to avoid taking risks. At crucial moments in his career, Bradshaw took bold chances whose benefits will long outlast him.

He had a diplomat's sense of where alliances could be built, and a field commander's instinct for the timely seizure of new ground. He was a wit and a great storyteller, who loved to appear to be letting you in on a secret whose exposure usually moved him a small step closer to some strategic objective.

It's strange to think how easily he might have missed finding his true life's work. When he arrived at the COC 18 years ago, he was an itinerant opera conductor who had never led a major company. He was hired not as artistic director but as chief conductor, essentially the same job he had held for 12 years at the larger, more prestigious San Francisco Opera. He was given a narrow mandate to improve musical standards in a company that was preparing for rapid growth and a move into a new ballet-opera house.

The house never happened, the economy went sour, and the company's general director, Brian Dickie, left abruptly with five years still on his contract. After a cursory search for a replacement, the board named Bradshaw artistic director in early 1994.

The predictable next act would have seen the new man making all the hard choices and painful cuts, before being nudged aside for a more experienced leader. The budget shrank 8 per cent during Bradshaw's first year, and subscription sales were crumbling. But if opera was a poker game, and he was a player with a shaky hand, he much preferred to double his bet than to fold. He was soon building ambitious productions that the company really couldn't afford, and making annual raids on its modest endowment fund.

The COC seemed headed for disaster when Bradshaw became general director in 1998. But he had already half-convinced the board and many donors that his optimistic vision of the company's future could become true.

His COC was a broad endeavour that engaged artists from film, theatre, dance and literature (and by extension, the audiences for those forms), as well as a civic project that needed a proper place to flourish. He understood the importance not just of putting on good shows, but of making the art form itself seem exciting and even hip. He engineered a gradual change in the COC's public image and sense of self that had begun when Dickie brought in Robert Lepage and Michael Levine for the company's landmark 1993 production of Schoenberg's Erwartung and Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle.

Bradshaw built on that success, the COC's cultural credit began to rise and an adventurous new audience joined the old one. Against all odds, Bradshaw charmed and lobbied and bullied his way to a new opera house. His most daring gambit may have been to announce that the company would begin staging Wagner's four-part Ring cycle in 2003 (later postponed by a year), and in the next breath to say that it was “inconceivable” for such a thing to happen without a new theatre.

At that point the company still had no land and no proof of government support. Bradshaw had said for years that the company needed a place to do big projects like the Ring; now he was insisting that the hall must be built because the Ring was going to happen there.

It was a crazy-brave move, and he knew it. He compared himself to the poker-playing heroine of Puccini's The Girl of the Golden West, who wins the game with an extra deck of cards hidden in her stocking. “I must think I've got another pack,” he said.

All the while, he was continuing with his very first mandate: to improve musical standards. The COC orchestra improved enormously during his tenure. Many gifted Canadian voices passed through the COC ensemble, though Canadians could be sparse in shows whose casts sometimes seemed to have been airlifted en masse from Eastern Europe. But in recent years, Canadian singers such as Isabel Bayrakdarian, Adrianne Pieczonka, Michael Schade and Russell Braun took leading roles in COC performances and on the company's seven CD recordings for the CBC.

Bradshaw expanded the COC's repertoire to include major operas by Janacek, Debussy and Mussorgsky, as well as rare but important works by Rossini, Stravinsky and Handel. He programmed contemporary operas by Hans Werner Henze and Poul Ruders, and made a success of them. But in his 13 years as artistic head, he brought only one Canadian opera to the company's mainstage. His flair for building alliances didn't extend to those who might have helped develop a strong Canadian repertoire for the COC.

As a conductor, he had a practical, down-to-earth approach. His performances emphasized energy, precision and balance. He was often less effective at exposing the poetic aspects of a score. His great talent was for bringing together all the forces that an opera company needs, both onstage and off.

Last year's Ring cycle, the biggest single project he and the company had ever attempted, was a triumph beyond Bradshaw's own high expectations. He often talked about the lure of the “unobtainable ticket,” and last season that became true for the COC, which sold out its entire first year at the Four Seasons.

Bradshaw died at the peak of his achievement and popularity. It would be absurd to say his work was done; he was only 63, and had great plans for the future, including the COC premiere (later this season) of Janacek's From the House of the Dead, and a promised rendezvous with Prokofiev's War and Peace. But the goals he had set his heart on had been achieved. He fought the good fight with all his strength, and as far as is possible in the arts, he lived a hero's life.