The path to opera addiction is gnarled and varied. Even so, management consultant Iain Scott's cautionary tale bears repeating. It is a disease, he confesses, sitting at the kitchen table in his North Toronto house, that afflicts five per cent of the population. He contracted the contagion one night in the late sixties, and he's been doing his utmost ever since to infect the rest of the population. He, and others of his ilk, are spreading the virus through the mostly affluent post-retirement crowd, as evidenced by the burgeoning range of opera-appreciation courses and tours to European and North American opera meccas for those with the money, time and inclination to feed their habit. For the culturati, opera is the new golf.
After graduating from St. Andrew's University in Scotland with a master's degree in medieval history, Scott began working for Royal Dutch Shell. The company posted him to an oil refinery on the Essex mud flats in southern England. "I was extraordinarily lonely, and the only person I could relate to was my boss, who had read Anglo Saxon with Tolkien at Oxford," he says over a cup of black coffee.
On the night in question, Scott had gone to his boss's house to rehearse a sales presentation for the next day, and found his supervisor not at home. The older man finally turned up, looking dishevelled and distraught, having been on a suicide watch in his capacity as a Samaritan. He went inside, poured himself three fingers of scotch -- "and didn't pour me any," recalls Scott. He then put a 45 disc of Kirsten Flagstad, "the greatest Wagnerian soprano ever," singing the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, on the gramophone. After playing the record three times, he began talking about Wagner and what this particular piece of music was all about.
"I got hooked," says Scott. "It was like going into the stacks of the library at university and finding huge aisles of books on something I didn't know existed. It was exhilarating."
More than 30 years later, the affable Scott is one of an elite group of mainly self-taught opera experts across the country who offer non-credit adult-education courses in the subject. Last year he took an early-retirement package from his executive position with a human-relations firm to devote more time to his vocation.
Scott's counterparts include Alan Aberbach in Vancouver, David Stanley Porter in London, Ont., and Richard Turp of Montreal. What these men have in common, besides an encyclopedic knowledge of opera, is a seemingly insatiable urge to communicate their passion to others. They all talk as persuasively as the proverbial refrigerator salesman in the High Arctic.
It hardly seems necessary, since there appears to be no shortage of applicants for their courses and guided tours.
Anne Craik, a former social worker with a scholarly interest in theatre, says Scott is an inspired and passionate teacher. That is what has kept her going back to his classes, including a week-long intensive session this past summer with him on Wagner's Valkyrie at Classical Pursuits, a "learning vacation" organized by Torontonian Ann Kirkland.
"Having a background in drama makes you very aware of what a heady brew performance is," Craik explained earlier this week. But opera added another and somewhat frightening level of complexity. Her drama training had taught her about structure and context and how to analyze performance. She thought it must be possible to demystify opera in the same way.
Somebody told her about Scott, saying he was "not only terribly knowledgeable, but also entertaining, which is always a big plus" and she signed up for his survey course about three years ago. "I learned about how opera developed," she says, "but more important, I learned in a formal way what I had known intuitively" -- that Italian opera is all about "voce, voce, voce," for example.
She also discovered that she had "a late-flowering passion" for Wagner's complexity and depth. "There are no arias in Wagner, no set pieces; you don't listen to somebody singing the same thing three times and three other people joining it. You have to study [his operas] note by note and word for word, but when push comes to shove, Wagner is the one who gets to me in a profound way."
Aberbach, 72, who founded the Opera Club in Vancouver, where Scott was one of his students when he lived there in the 1970s, is now a retired professor of American history at Simon Fraser University. He still teaches courses in opera appreciation at the university's Harbour Centre campus.
Aberbach became "infected" after hearing Dorothy Kirsten sing on the radio when he was still in high school. One day when he was passing the Met he saw a playbill for Faust with Kirsten singing Margarita. He bought a standing-room-only ticket to see her perform, and has been besotted ever since. For a while he studied singing, hoping to become "one of the world's great tenors."
Alas, it turned out he had the voice of a baritone. That, to him, was second best. "The baritone plays the friend or the villain," he told me over the phone from Vancouver, "and he always loses the girl." Thwarted in his vocal ambitions, he began studying the history of opera instead, and has since written three books on the subject.
London's Porter, who will be 73 next month, has just returned from leading his 156th opera tour and is gearing up for a full round of classes that he teaches at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto as part of the COC's outreach program. The COC signed up 74 people months ago (and started a waiting list) of applicants willing to pay approximately $4,000 each for his week-long guided tour to see the Kirov Opera from St. Petersburg perform the Ring Cycle in Baden Baden, Germany, in January. "Whenever I put on a Ring Cycle tour, people come crawling out of the woodwork" he says.
Like Aberbach, Porter came to the teaching of opera from an academic background. A classicist who taught high-school Latin and Greek, Porter dreamt of becoming a professional musician, and studied piano with the late Mona Bates. When he realized he wasn't going to make it on the concert stage, he sublimated his urge to perform into a study of operatic history and theory.
Eventually he took a break from teaching and earned a doctorate in the Greek playwright Euripides. This was a natural progression for somebody with his interest in opera, he suggests, pointing out that opera was invented by Florentine intellectuals who were trying to recreate the performance practices of the ancient Greeks. After teaching for more than a decade at the University of Western Ontario, he founded the London Opera Guild in 1979 and began a third career teaching opera appreciation to adults.
His students fall into two camps: those who have always gone to the opera, love it, and want to deepen their contextual and technical understanding; and neophytes who are curious and eager to learn. There is also a big social component to his tours and courses; many of his students come back year after year and form friendships with other members of the group.
One of them is Marina Yoshida, who calls Porter a "gem." She has always been interested in vocal music and theatre, but after retiring as a high-school French teacher a few years ago, she found she had the time to study the form as well as attend opera performances.
In the past five years, she has taken at least 10 courses, gone on a dozen of Porter's tours, half of them to opera houses in Europe, and found a new circle of friends who share her passion for opera. What she loves about Porter's approach is the way he concentrates on a particular composer or period, and plays videos, DVDs or CDs to show the dynamic contrast between traditional and avant-garde interpretations of the same opera.
Montrealer Richard Turp was born into opera, in so much as his late father, André Turp, was a well-known tenor from the same generation as Jon Vickers and Maureen Forrester. A musician and a teacher in the music faculty at the University of Montreal, Turp was so outraged by the downgrading of music in school curricula that for years he taught outreach classes for young people between the ages of 15 and 30 at l'Opéra Montreal.
Six years ago he and a group of colleagues formed the André Turp Musical Society, which offers seminars and lectures on the history and theory of opera. What's more, the society runs master classes in conjunction with the opera school at the U of M and invites subscribers to attend so that they can acquire insights into the technical demands of singing.
Taking courses is not the only way to feed a compulsion for opera, as Janice Lavery has discovered. She has always liked opera, but she became obsessive after going to a COC performance of Tosca in 1999. Because she is a librarian in the Toronto Public Library system, she organized her own self-study program using the video, manuscript and research resources of her workplace. When a job came up as a supervisor in the department of performing arts and languages at the Metro Toronto Reference Library, she applied and got the job.
Although she has been tempted to sign up for courses, she prefers to spend her money in a minimum donation to the president's circle to the COC, which nets her all sorts of perks, such as backstage tours and working rehearsals. "I'm a librarian, I'm divorced, I'm in a different age and income bracket," she says, "and I can't always go to classes on a Tuesday afternoon."
Nevertheless, she shares the same belief as other opera addicts: "The more you learn about something, the more you realize there is to learn." And now she's busily infecting her friends.
