Half a loaf for opera buffs?
Last Friday and Saturday the opera department of the Faculty of Music at the
University of Toronto presented the first Canadian performance of Janacek's most
moving and dramatic opera, Katya Kabanova. As Janacek is one of the four or five
most admired and performed operatic composers of this century whose operas are
now in the repertoire of practically every opera house around the world, I
expected that these performances would be completely sold out, especially as
this performance was - nearly 50 years after Janacek's death - the first time
that any of his operas had been staged by Canadian artists. But as this great
event in the history of opera in Canada did hardly fill more than 60 per cent to
70 per cent of the seats in a theatre that takes only 800 seats (one-quarter of
O'Keefe Centre) I have to agree with John Kraglund in his review Does The
Toronto Public Deserve a Full-Season Opera House? (March 28).
Of course Janacek does not need Toronto. He had his greatest admirers among
composers of such different trends as Hindemith, Strauss and Britten, and
conductors as famous as Kleiber, Klemperer, Bernstein, Kubelik, Tennstedt or our
Andrew Davis. And his operas have been the highlight in festivals in Edinburgh,
Holland or the Montreal Olympics in 1976 where the Hamburg Opera chose to
present Janacek's Jenufa.
If Toronto with more than 2 million inhabitants cannot fill completely the seats
and if our opera lovers decide by their indifference and lack of interest to
chase out of Canada some of the very finest voices of these performances, they
can blame only themselves if we never achieve a full opera season. Our best
singers will continue to leave us and find that many cities in Central Europe of
the size of Hamilton can offer them more than the whole of Toronto.
Oskar Morawetz
Toronto
