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.
