It's not as if you have to wheel out the heavy artillery of argument to convince Torontonians who love opera that they should be thrilled at the prospect of the opening of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
They've been putting on a brave face for a long time. Forty-five years to be precise — sitting stoically in what was first the O'Keefe Centre, later the Hummingbird — and anyone who was any farther back than Row M is beginning to get a little curious about what La Bohème actually sounds like. Before that, there was opera at Hart House, and opera at the Eaton Auditorium, and on occasion, when a Met touring company got blown off course and landed, horned helmets and all, in Toronto, there was opera, or something like it, at Maple Leaf Gardens.
Toronto's operatic past means that opera lovers don't need to be encouraged to doff their caps when Richard Bradshaw passes them on the street these days. "Bravo, Maestro," they call — for Bradshaw's perseverance on this particular front is deserving of some entirely new level of the Order of Canada. It would have to be called the "We're Damn Lucky to Have Him" award.
Nor do opera lovers need to be told to shake Jack Diamond's hand in gratitude. They've been yodeling across the mezzanine and looking at old photographs of Bob Goulet, Jose Feliciano and Don Rickles during opera intermissions for long enough to know good architectural news when they see it.
Martin Gonsalez, while waiting to cross University Ave., on Queen St., across the street from the new Opera House building in Toronto. (Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail)
Related Articles
Interactives
No, opera lovers are already well aware of their good fortune. They pinch themselves several times a day as it is.
The more interesting question is: Why should anyone who has no interest in opera be proud of what now stands at the corner of Queen and University in downtown Toronto? I happen to love opera, I might as well admit. I think of it as a kind of delicious overabundance of ... well, of everything. If you love music and you love theatre, you might as well sleep with the twins in my modest, if not entirely Presbyterian, view.
Indeed, it may be opera's aesthetic excessiveness that appeals to me so much. I love being dazzled by the sweeping music and the adventurous design and the artistic rigour of a production such as the Canadian Opera Company's Siegfried. Equally, I love weeping good old-fashioned buckets.
Both at the tragedy of the story and at the sheer beauty of the singing in the company's completely classic approach to Puccini's Madama Butterfly a few seasons ago. So it's easy to see why I've been cheering on the construction workers for the past year or so.
But why should anyone who doesn't know Parsifal from Pagliacci give two hoots? The answer, I think, has something to do with the importance and the wonder of cities.
When I was a boy, I sometimes walked from the YMCA in Hamilton, Ont., to my father's office in the Medical Arts Building to get a ride home when he completed his Saturday-morning appointments. I usually arrived before he was finished, and I sat in his waiting room and read magazines.
I didn't realize it at the time, but the magazines I found there in the early 1960s — Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, Maclean's, Life, Time — were representative of a golden age of magazine journalism. They were the last glorious blossoming of something advertisers have managed to kill off successfully: They were publications that came under the heading of "general interest" — which, when you stop to think about it, is exactly the heading you'd like a 12-year-old to spend some time under during a few Saturday mornings of adolescent life.
The stories I read in my father's magazines covered an eclectic range of subjects. Hell's Angels on one page. Pablo Picasso on the next. And one of the things I remember most vividly about those articles is another quaint memento of a bygone age: Not everything was explained to me. Verdi was Verdi, and not "Verdi, the famous Italian opera composer." Writers — as well as editors and publishers — assumed that a certain level of general knowledge obtained among the readership of a general-interest magazine. More importantly, they assumed that where there was not knowledge (as was frequently the case when the reader happened to be 12) there would be curiosity.
It seems to me this is how civilization works: not as a balanced exchange of information from someone who knows something to someone else who already knows the same thing. That, if I'm not mistaken, is the axis of idiocy on which a good deal of contemporary life is already based. That is reality TV.
Civilization is about another kind of exchange — from someone who either knows a lot about something or is very good at it, to someone who doesn't know as much, or is nowhere near as good but who is either interested enough to learn or curious enough to become interested. Who is, in other words, alive.
The ideal consumer, I sometimes think, would be deceased enough to stay permanently within his or her demographic, but alive enough to still be spending money. As markets get more and more narrowly focused, anything that appears to be outside the confines of a target audience — anything that might arouse something as uncontained as curiosity or as broadly based as learning — is either deleted or explained to death.
And as the media increasingly surrenders to the commercial demand to level the relationship between those who send out information and those who receive it, those of us who enjoy the serendipity of general interest, and who depend on the expertise of others to point the way to knowledge or pleasure, or even, perish the thought, to wisdom, look elsewhere for sustenance. We look to the last great compendium of general interest. We look to the city.
Those of us who love cities love the way they come at us from dozens of different angles at the same time. The richness of the array — some of it to our taste, some not — is why cities are so exciting and why we learn so much by living in one. Cities stretch us, challenge us, broaden us. Cities, like magazines in their glory years, can pique our curiosity with an almost unlimited table of contents.
And we become intrigued. About hockey, perhaps; about graffiti, perhaps; about commodities, perhaps; about Verdi. We are led to realms that we might not otherwise have known about by the passions and expertise and genius of our fellow citizens.
The delight of living in a city is that it's possible to flip through its pages. We might, for instance, wonder what all the fuss is about as we drive by the beautifully lit transparency of Diamond's opera house while crowds are making their way in for the first performance of Das Rheingold.
The beauty of a city is that it can provide the answers to the questions it so naturally raises. What's all the fuss about? Well, come and see, and hear, for yourself.
This is particularly true of a city as diverse and as unformed as Toronto. You want ugliness? You want beauty? You want tragedy? You want comedy? Then walk a block or two, and it's all here.
And it is out of this profoundly general amalgamation that something truly extraordinary can sometimes arise. It could be a really good teacher. Or it could be a fabulous guitar player. It could be the help that is provided to someone who desperately needs it. Or it could be the Ring cycle.
The one responsibility a city has is the encouragement of the possibility of excellence. The extent to which it addresses this duty is how, in comparison to the great cities of the world, it will be judged. Excellence of education, excellence of health care, excellence of baseball, of public transportation, of commerce, of charity, of waterfront, excellence of art galleries, excellence of justice, excellence of opera — to name but a few of the impossible ambitions of a city that might aspire to greatness.
It is not necessarily the city's responsibility to achieve these goals, or to pay for them, but it is its job to make room for their possibility, and to celebrate when, against so many odds, that possibility becomes reality. That's what cities are for.
Tomorrow, when the ribbon at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts is finally cut, opera lovers and those who are indifferent to opera should join together in celebrating one more step toward an unobtainable but endlessly beckoning civic goal.
