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The opera community was stunned into temporary silence Thursday with the death of Richard Bradshaw, the man who built Canada's first professional opera house and launched it with the country's first full mounting of Wagner's Ring Cycle.

The general director of the Canadian Opera Company died of an apparent heart attack at Pearson airport on Wednesday evening while waiting to claim his luggage after a holiday in the Maritimes with his wife Diana. He was 63.

"It's a terrible loss, a terrible loss," said architect Jack Diamond, on holiday in Nova Scotia. Describing Mr. Bradshaw as a force with a huge persona, he said that "without his drive, we would not have had an opera house." Although he was shocked by the news of Mr. Bradshaw's death, Mr. Diamond, who had worked with Mr. Bradshaw for a decade on the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, said it was not unexpected.

"We always had that fear. He drove himself and travelled a lot and he was overweight and choleric and he had an aversion to hospitals and doctors."

Mr. Bradshaw was born in Rugby, England, in 1944. After graduating from the University of London in 1965, he studied conducting and worked as a choral director in London and at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera before taking up a position as resident conductor at the San Francisco Opera Company in 1977. He made a guest performance with the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto in 1988.

The following year, he accepted an appointment with the company as chief conductor and head of music, just as then-premier Bob Rae pulled the plug on government support for the $360-million Moshe Safdie-designed ballet-opera house.

Undeterred, Mr. Bradshaw picked up his baton, persuaded lawyer Arthur Scace to deploy his own fundraising cudgel and relentlessly arm-twisted, charmed and otherwise browbeat bureaucrats and politicians in what he liked to call "the Thirty Years' War" to build an opera house in Toronto. During his tenure, he conducted more than 60 operas and took the COC on a hugely successful tour to the Edinburgh Festival.

He was a man of many interests and friendships that included both the historian Margaret MacMillan, who found him "widely read" and "such fun," and former newspaper proprietor Conrad Black.

"His contribution to opera in Canada was unique and indispensable," Lord Black wrote in an e-mail message Thursday from Chicago. "He picked up the pieces from the indefinite deferral of the opera house planned in the early eighties and steadily built the quality of the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra as he made the case for a proper opera house, appropriate to a G7 country in the 21st century. He was forceful and diplomatic by turns, and the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts is preeminently a monument to him. He was a great man and a dear friend and is irreplaceable in both roles."

As outgoing as he was driven, Mr. Bradshaw was an enthusiastic member of the Massey College community at the University of Toronto, where he has been a senior fellow since 1995. "Right from his election, he made all the dress rehearsals available to the junior fellows [graduate students]," said John Fraser, master of Massey College. "He built an opera culture here and he put Canada on the opera map."

A grateful opera board rewarded Mr. Bradshaw's efforts last year by renewing his contract as general director for 10 years and by approving the naming of the amphitheatre in his honour at the Four Seasons Centre. The board issued a brief statement yesterday, calling Mr. Bradshaw "a visionary leader" and "one of the country's most outspoken and fearless advocates for culture and the arts."

David Ferguson, president of the COC board, said, "In our sorrow we pay tribute to the inspiration and leadership he played in the cultural landscape of his adopted country."

The next sad task is to strike a search committee to find a successor. "They are huge boots to fill," Mr. Diamond said Thursday of the man he called Richard, Coeur de lion. "He has created something that nobody else could have, but now that it is up and running, there is an opportunity for somebody to pick it up and run. Sadly, it is not Richard."

Mr. Bradshaw leaves his wife Diana and his two children, Jenny and James. The funeral is Tuesday, Aug. 21, at 11 a.m. at St. James Cathedral in Toronto.