Ahh, the European getaway, new and inspiring sights, smells, and sounds; the discovery of beautiful things. In this week's tales of life-changing operatic events, we hear from two patrons of the COC who fell in love with opera while taking a trip across the pond.
My most memorable opera experience was in France in June last year (2015). I was visiting my French boyfriend who was living in Paris at the time and he told me to dress up for an evening surprise. I had no idea what to expect, so I put on a dress and got whisked away in his little Fiat out to the Parisian suburbs of Sceaux. When we arrived, we walked through a beautiful manicured park until we reached the destination. Turns out, he surprised me with an outdoor performance of La Traviata by Verdi with the Château de Sceaux serving as the backdrop. I thought I was dreaming. It was magnificent. I’ve attached a photo taken on my BlackBerry. It absolutely doesn’t do it justice.
In the summer of 1995, before my final year of university, I flew to Germany for a couple of weeks of travel. I devoted three days to exploring Berlin, and the city was filled with tourists and excitement that summer since artists Jeanne-Claude and Christo had wrapped the Reichstag parliament building in incandescent white and silver fabric in a statement of environmental art. The Berlin Wall had come down only six years prior and the former East Berlin neighbourhoods still looked decidedly different from those in the West. I admired the famous Brandenburg Gate and strolled Unter den Linden Boulevard, passing the Berlin Opera House. An impulsive stop at the ticket counter resulted in last-minute tickets to La Traviata that evening. The combination of the fascinating city, the beauty of the opera house and Verdi's magic was perfect for the creation of a lifelong opera lover.
Since that chance opportunity in Berlin, I have attended many different productions by the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, and was happy when my 12-year-old daughter decided to test out "this opera stuff" and accompanied me last fall. While I'm not sure she gets the same goosebumps I do, and she would never freely admit that her life had been changed by attending her first opera, she did stay awake and say it was "ok;" I'll call that an early win and get to work on spreading the magic to her younger sister and brother. I've seen firsthand how early, repeated exposure to sports has turned them into little Leafs and Jays fans—I plan to use that same logic and method for Verdi, Mozart and Puccini.
This Fidelio was a very striking production, directed by a very famous Russian director, Yuri Lyubinov. At the time, Lyubinov had been given a leave by the Russian government to stage a play in London, and he didn’t go back. They wanted him to go back, but he just didn’t. He was in a legal limbo. He stayed in Europe and started directing a lot of opera, and among the operas that he staged was the Fidelio at Stuttgart.
It was a very contemporary interpretation, in the way that he did not make it about an 18th-century prisoner. The auditorium itself is very small, and they had supers dressed as police officers or KGB people standing at every door, and they just came in with a bang! It was incredibly striking—the effect of the stage design was so chilling.
The whole design and direction was so politically charged—it made the opera so incredibly relevant. The things that are expressed in the opera—it’s about a prisoner, and the liberation of that prisoner, and what the wife does for him—made it more than just a story. It seemed to be something that was actually about us, about the audience. In those days, that situation was quite real, and it could have happened to any of us. That is what made it so special.