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4 NEW REGIME IN OT TAWA

When Lester Pearson left office in April 1968 and Pierre Elliott Trudeau succeeded him as prime minister, Judy LaMarsh handed over the secretary of state’s job to the former Montreal journalist Gérard Pelletier—a shy, somewhat diffident Quebec intellectual. He had been born in Victoriaville, Quebec, the son of a hardworking railway station-manager and a mother who worked occasionally as a seamstress. Thanks to his good education and his activities in Catholic youth movements in the province, he had travelled to South America and postwar Europe, where he developed an intense interest in cultural matters and social change. He became a journalist, working first in trade union journals, then as a public affairs reporter and commentator for Radio Canada, and was eventually hired as the editor of the powerful Montreal newspaper La Presse. He resigned in 1965 to go into politics with his two close friends Jean Marchand, a prominent union leader, and Pierre Trudeau, a lawyer, essayist, and sometime dilettante.

Pierre Trudeau’s secretary of state, Gérard Pelletier, brought ideas to Ottawa that clashed with Hamilton Southam’s view of the world but which would have long-term effects on the practice of arts and culture in Canada.

Dubbed the “Three Wise Men,” Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau had been recruited by Pearson’s Liberals to run in Quebec in the upcoming federal election. Pelletier had been in the forefront of the fight against the “Great Darkness” of the Duplessis era in Quebec (although some political opponents alleged that this iconic term was nothing but Liberal propaganda).¹ He had strong ideas about the role of culture in national life and, once appointed to a position of authority in the Cabinet, he would lose no time in putting them into effect. In the meantime, his opening gambit so far as the Arts Centre was concerned was to declare that it better not be “too snobbish.”² He and Southam came from two different worlds—and they would cross like ships in the night, with only de rigueur formal contact and little understanding of each other. Pelletier was one of the few neither enticed nor persuaded by Southam’s celebrated social skills.

While the political regime changed in Ottawa, the struggle continued between the NAC and the Stratford Festival over their agreement. In March 1969 they organized a window-dressing signing ceremony in the unfinished foyer of the Arts Centre which briefly turned the theatre company into the “Stratford National Theatre Company of Canada.” The biggest stumbling block was money, but the agreement would soon start to unravel in other ways as well. Stratford had set its “irreducible” budget to come to Ottawa at $1,062 million, but David Haber confirmed that the NAC English theatre budget could not rise above $875,000 at “the absolute maximum.”³ Southam, who seemed to have a penchant for airport meetings, arranged another one, this time at Toronto’s Malton Airport (now Lester B. Pearson International Airport) to try to thrash out the problems.

Now another impediment emerged—the prospect of the Stratford Festival appearing in Toronto and elsewhere under the banner of the National Arts Centre. The Canada Council had weighed in to say that if it was giving Stratford grant money, the company could not tour under the NAC label, and especially not to the Ontario capital. This turf war reached the highest levels of the government, demonstrating how political pressure comes into play when government monies are at stake. Finally, Ernie Steele, the undersecretary of state, concurred with the Canada Council’s position. It would not be the last time that the NAC would lose out in a power struggle with the other federal arts agency. Board chair Lawrence Freiman, by now ill and in and out of hospital, declared himself hurt and betrayed by this breakdown in the Stratford arrangement, and Southam was equally upset. Touring Stratford as the NAC’s English theatre company would have added great prestige to the NAC enterprise. Stratford’s own ambivalence about the arrangements and some behind-the-scenes footwork by its resistant management had contributed to the decision. For once there were hard feelings, and Southam uncharacteristically accused his Stratford counterpart, general manager Bill Wylie, of bad faith.

On the music front, things continued to proceed far more smoothly. Jean-Marie Beaudet had been diligently forging ahead with his search for a conductor and now believed he had found his candidate in Mario Bernardi, a Canadian based in London at the Sadler’s Wells Opera whom he knew from earlier stints in Toronto and Stratford. Except for a lack of experience conducting symphonic music, Bernardi seemed to have all the other attributes that Beaudet was seeking.

While the music world in Canada at the time was expanding, many of its better talents still went abroad to study and work, Bernardi among them, and they returned only occasionally as assignments came up. Opportunities in Canada were limited, and although there was work with the CBC in radio and television, all the orchestras had short seasons, never more than thirty-two weeks, and professional musicians had to scramble to find summer employment. The Stratford Festival created important new possibilities as the ubiquitous Louis Applebaum developed a lively music program there in conjunction with the drama productions. Musicians performed incidental music for the plays, a new chamber music orchestra presented its own concert series, and a short season of smaller operas had even been added to the season at the Avon Theatre. Because the pit was so constricted, there were never more than thirty orchestral players. It was tough to get hired, and the group attracted a high calibre of performers. One summer the concertmasters from the orchestras in Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Quebec all turned up for work. The operas produced included works by Mozart, Rossini, and, one year, even a small Britten opera. Mario Bernardi returned regularly from London each summer to conduct some of these productions.

In the summer of 1967 Beaudet brought Freiman and Southam to Stratford to meet briefly with Bernardi (though he had already introduced Bernardi to Southam in London). Beaudet knew the conductor from the days when the young musician served as rehearsal pianist for a CBC production of Carman and as the piano soloist for a concert that he had conducted in Montreal. (Years later Bernardi said that he “did not think Beaudet was a very good conductor,” and he was not alone in this opinion.) The Stratford outing gave the NAC team little more than a fleeting introduction to Bernardi, and they left it to Beaudet to see about the hiring. In the fall he flew to London, where he had a long meeting with Bernardi at the Savage Club.⁴

While his Canadian birth was fortuitous, Bernardi had received his core musical training in the demanding and disciplined schools of Europe. Born in 1930 in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, he had moved to Italy at the age of six with his mother, living in the small city of Treviso, near Venice, where they remained throughout the war. He studied at the Venice Conservatory and, at just sixteen, two years under the age for matriculation, received special permission to travel to Rome to write his final examinations. There he achieved the highest marks. He excelled in the keyboard instruments of piano and harpsichord, and, when he returned to Canada in the late forties, he hoped to become a soloist. A man of many talents, he was considered among the best of Canada’s promising young musicians emerging in the postwar period—a group that included Glenn Gould. When Bernardi discovered that there were no postgraduate courses at the University of Toronto to suit his needs, he began to take private lessons and to carve out a career as a “musician around town,” playing recitals either alone or with experienced musicians such as the violinist Katherine Parr. A skilled sight-reader, he also picked up work as a rehearsal pianist for the Canadian Opera Company and, by his mid-twenties, had begun to conduct.

One day at a rehearsal for the Canadian Opera Company, Walter Susskind, the benevolent orchestra conductor, turned around and handed his baton to Bernardi, urging him to “give it a try.” Bernardi quickly caught the opera addiction and, with theatre director Leon Major, soon had his own opera production at the COC, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Despite its success, he was warned by general manager Herman Geiger-Torel that there would be nothing else for him in the immediate future. One day, after helping a friend to apply for a Canada Council grant for study abroad, he decided to try for one himself. Dr. Arnold Walter and the Canada Council’s Peter Dwyer guided his interests towards England and, when the grant came through, he left Toronto after the second act of a performance of The Marriage of Figaro that he had helped to rehearse, taking the night flight to London with his beautiful young wife, the singer Mona Kelly. He auditioned for a job at the Sadler’s Wells Opera and, within six months, became one of its resident conductors. He had been there almost ten years when Beaudet tracked him down.

At the Savage Club that late autumn day, they “talked for hours and hours in the drawing room, which had a lovely ambiance,” discussing their hopes and dreams for the future.⁵ The size of the orchestra dominated their conversation, and they were tremendously excited by the flexibility that a smaller group would present, both for touring and for teaching: Beaudet called it his “Haydn orchestra,” while Bernardi thought it was more like a Schubert-sized ensemble, larger than a chamber orchestra but inspired by the classical orchestra model. Bernardi had scarcely conducted a symphony orchestra in his life. Even though he would be going to a far-distant place that his English friends would mockingly drawl out as “Ot-ta-wa,” this new orchestra would present him with a golden opportunity.

Even before the building was finished, Jean-Marie Beaudet (left) had found Canadian-born conductor Mario Bernardi and had him appointed the first conductor of the National Arts Centre Orchestra. Photo © John Evans.

For the National Arts Centre, Bernardi’s Canadian citizenship made him ideal, and Beaudet seemed to have huge confidence in the younger man’s abilities. Without further ado, he offered him the job and flew back to Ottawa. There Southam happily accepted this proposal, and Beaudet went straight on to the board to report, “I have found our conductor.” Mario Bernardi was hired.

Another new staffer in Ottawa was Ken Murphy, a CBC Radio producer from Montreal and former orchestral musician. He had been hired by the NAC’s first public-relations director, Laurent Duval, to become his bilingual assistant in promoting the new centre and in building an audience for its performances, especially in music. Shortly after he arrived, he became friends with Jean-Marie Beaudet, whose musical talents and insights he admired enormously. Early in 1968 Beaudet asked him to move to the Music Department, initially to help him create the orchestra and with the promise that he would become its first manager.

Beaudet had a clear strategy. They would not advertise the new musical positions but rely instead on the “musicians’ grapevine” to spread the word they were hiring.⁶ Auditions were to be held first in Canada and, if positions still remained open, then in the United States and Europe. This approach proved effective. Many of Canada’s most talented young musicians, such as the bassoonist Michael Namer, had moved abroad to study, frequently with the help of the Canada Council, and, until now, prospects of work in Canada had been uncertain. When Namer and others heard about this new opportunity, however, they immediately applied, and between four and five hundred applications poured in. The audition team comprised Beaudet, Bernardi, and Canadian violinist Lea Foli, then associate concertmaster at the Minnesota Symphony and a prospective candidate for the position of concertmaster. Ray Still, a renowned oboist who held the first chair at the Chicago Symphony and who Bernardi had met at Stratford, sat in for all the sessions with woodwind players. Bernardi knew what he was looking for—young musicians who were good players and enthusiastic about joining the new orchestra. Experience was not so important. His preference was for “young enthusiasts who had not become jaded by too much professional experience.”⁷

Another musician the NAC consulted was Robert Oades, then serving as personnel manager for the musicians at Stratford. This quiet-spoken trumpeter had emigrated from London, where he had played at Covent Garden. In Toronto, despite its core group of “highly competent musicians,”⁸ he found it difficult as a newcomer to break in. Fortunately, his specialty as a “Bach trumpeter” called for more skill than the usual dance-band standard of playing then common in the city and, before long, he won a $1,000 Canada Council scholarship to play with the Bach Society, a group founded by singer Lois Marshall and pianist Glenn Gould. Before he could perform with the group, however, it collapsed. Finding work at Stratford had been a god-send for him.

Now, when Bernardi asked for suggestions of names for the new orchestra in Ottawa, Oades was surprised that few of the musicians he knew were interested in this steady well-paid work. To many, Ottawa seemed like “the end of the earth” compared with the lively musical scene in Toronto. Oades had played in the capital when the Ottawa CBC Chamber Orchestra, a largely amateur group led by Fred Karam of the University of Ottawa, brought him in for special trumpet works, and he was not so daunted. When he received a telephone call from Ken Murphy informing him that the audition team would be in Toronto the next day and inviting him to try out, Oades jumped at the chance. He was signed up immediately after the audition and agreed to move to Ottawa not only as a player but also as the personnel manager for the NAC orchestra.

Bernardi had played with a number of Toronto musicians at the Canadian Opera Company and had earned a reputation for being “not an easy conductor—very, very demanding.”⁹ When he invited several of these players to try out as section heads, they declined to apply. Even singers were sometimes put off by him and, while they loved going to Stratford to perform, they became concerned when they learned that Bernardi would be on the podium. Nevertheless, Oades, who had played for him several times as part of pick-up orchestras for the Canadian Opera Company, believed he was the right man for the Ottawa job precisely because of those strong qualities of discipline and toughness.

By the fall of 1968 it was evident that Lea Foli would not be joining the orchestra as concertmaster, so the NAC embarked on a strenuous search to find someone else. The spotlight settled on Walter Prystawski, a Canadian who had been abroad for the previous ten years and was currently living in Basel as co-concertmaster of the Basler Orchester Gesellschaft, a smaller-town version of the Vienna Philharmonic. The orchestra presented three series of symphonic music every year and served as the pit orchestra for the operas, operettas, and ballet performed in the Basel Theatre. Prystawski had become well versed in all the different roles filled by a resident orchestra. The Arts Centre was determined to hire as many Canadian musicians as possible, and finding one with international experience was a bonus. Prystawski and Bernardi had known each other from their Toronto student days, when Bernardi was already earning a reputation and Prystawski had played for him once in a concert with the CBC Orchestra.

By coincidence, Prystawski and his young family had returned to Canada for Christmas 1968 but had heard nothing about the new orchestra. Only after returning to Basel in the new year did he find a letter in his pile of mail inviting him to London to audition for Beaudet and Bernardi. Prystawski recalls having “a devil of a time” booking a flight that would give him time for the London meeting before he was due back in the Swiss city to play a series of concerts.

When he arrived in London he caught up with Bernardi at Steinway Hall, where, settled amid a group of pianos, they spent the afternoon making music together and sizing each other up. It was a pleasant afternoon, both men recalled, as they played through a series of sonatas. Bernardi liked the violinist a lot, and Prystawski had equally positive memories of playing “some Brahms, definitely a Mozart and a little solo Bach.” By the end of the day the conductor told him, “You have the job, but you need a new fiddle!” Prystawski didn’t mind the comment. He also wanted a better instrument.

The two musicians went back to the Dorchester Hotel on London’s Park Lane, where Jean-Marie Beaudet was waiting. The trio ended the day over drinks in relaxed conversation while they talked on about their hopes and dreams for the new orchestra. Prystawski remembered the occasion as “one of the nicer afternoons of my life.”¹⁰

The attraction of the job for Prystawski was starting something from scratch. He had loved his time in Europe and being part of a long tradition of music, surrounded by musical icons. In the blue markings on the musical scores from which he was playing he could trace the evolutions of music. When he took over at the Arts Centre, his first few years were spent “marking the scores.” All the musical scores were new, and as Bernardi had too much else on his hands, left the task to the concertmaster. “It sounds like a mechanical job,” Prystawski explained, “but it’s important. It tells people how to divide up their bows, how to play certain notes from a bowing point of view,” and the best way physically to make certain sounds. Marked scores become a history of how specific music was played with a certain conductor and a particular orchestra, and that was to become the case at the National Arts Centre as well. The attraction for Prystawski in coming to Ottawa was that he could have his own “creative input,” that he “would not be bound or constricted” by those very traditions with which European music was imbued. In Ottawa, “the hallways would be so wide that you couldn’t see the sides of them.” And, on a personal level, his small daughter was just ready to start school.

The story of the beautiful Guadagnini violin played by the NAC orchestra’s concertmaster has many versions. Mario Bernardi had made a new and better violin a condition of Prystawski’s hiring and indicated that the Arts Centre would help with funds to acquire a new instrument. Shortly after Prystawski returned to Switzerland, he took a day off to contact “fiddle dealers” and borrowed several instruments to try out by playing them with the Basel orchestra. Unfortunately, the cost of the potential candidates was usually three times the estimated $10,000 budget, the sum that NAC planners had in mind for a good violin. One day when he went to have a bow repaired, the shopkeeper mentioned a “J.B. Guadagnini” violin that was already out on loan to a young violin student for her graduation concert. Prystawski attended the concert and agonized for nearly a week before he could get his hands on the fiddle. There was no question that this was the instrument, and the NAC advanced $12,000 to pay for it. Within a few years it was to become the subject of one of the first financial causes célèbres at the centre.

Prystawski’s recollection was that the NAC would take a pittance from his salary in instalments over the coming years so he could slowly pay for the violin. Bernardi’s remembrance was that a fine instrument had been purchased for the NAC concertmaster and would be available in perpetuity to that position. Whatever the arrangement, no details of it were recorded, although the magnificent violin appeared as a line item in the NAC budget as one of its assets. Some time after the launch of the new centre and when the organization was settling down to regular activity, the auditor general arrived on the scene to review the finances. The matter of the violin was untidy, with a few dollars taken from the musician’s salary while the item itself still appeared as a valuable asset to the centre. The auditor general was especially annoyed that the payoff loan to Prystawski was interest free, yet the value of the violin was rapidly accruing. The trustees resolved to fix things and asked Southam to take care of the matter. After he left the board meeting, he called Prystawski to his office and asked him to “sell the fiddle back to us.” By Prystawski’s account, after a long pause, he refused. He left Southam’s office and quickly arranged a meeting with his bank manager. When he returned with a cheque, Southam remained silent, although eventually the two men negotiated and came to an agreement.

The new concertmaster, Walter Prystawski (left), showed off the newly purchased, precious “J.B. Guadagnini” violin to fellow violinists and new orchestra members John Gazi and Joan Milkson. Photo © Helen Flaherty.

The auditor general continued to be perturbed, both that the deal was based on the violin’s unrevised value—its appraised value was now around $45,000—and that this “crown asset” was even being sold off. Southam stoutly argued that the NAC had the right to sell the violin, though he did get on the phone to see what it was really worth. With the board, he sought the help of the prominent Ottawa lawyer Gordon Henderson, who deemed that the sale was not illegal, but the price should take into account the violin’s increased worth. Southam skirted this issue with the board by arguing the merits of “replacement” versus “real market” value—and he deemed the latter in the $15,000 to $18,000 range. Prystawski increased his obligation to the centre, including a further loan of $3,000 on which he agreed to pay interest. Southam, not for the first or last time, reached into his own pocket to top up the difference. While the NAC trustees weren’t happy, Prystawski became full owner of the instrument.

The incident exemplified the changing times that were slowly starting to impinge on the NAC. The droit du seigneur by which Southam had managed to build the place and run it since its inauguration was tightening up as government officials began to pay closer attention to the centre’s operations. Although it was something of a private fiefdom at the outset, certainly run as an independent theatre, that situation was to become less and less the case. The violin incident also illuminated the way Southam often functioned, from his immediate agreement that an excellent instrument should be purchased to his search for a diplomatic solution when the government put his Board of Trustees on the spot. His decision to let Prystawski keep the instrument and his insistence, both to the auditor general and his own board, that he had the right to make this choice was standard Southam practice. He always liked to get his own way, although he did not hesitate to smooth the process by helping Prystawski out with a loan from his own pocket and expediting the purchase at a reduced price. For Prystawski, the violin would become a valuable asset in his old age. By 2006 it was worth around $400,000.

By March 1969 Beaudet had an upbeat report on the orchestra for the Board of Directors. Applications had been received from all over the world, including Asia, and nearly two hundred musicians had been given formal auditions. While there were still a few places for string players, Beaudet was satisfied that the orchestra was being created with little damage to existing major Canadian orchestras. No musicians had been hired from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, only one or two from the Montreal Symphony, and one each from Winnipeg and Vancouver.

Beaudet also gave the trustees a taste of the music Ottawa might hear in the coming years. Two subscription series were planned for the opening season, “a balance of classic, romantic and contemporary music” that would include an all-Stravinsky program, Mendelsohn’s Italian Symphony, the Schumann piano concerto, and works by Britten, Bartok, Wagner, and Schoenberg. Bernardi would also run a chamber music series, and the first year would end with a group of pop concerts in June. The most exciting idea was the proposal for at least three new works to be commissioned from Canadian composers. In addition, the NAC had included children’s concerts in its plans and had hired Ron Singer as head of Youth Programming. He was already working on a series of school matinées with the full orchestra, in collaboration with school boards on both sides of the Ottawa River. Day trips by the orchestra to local towns were in the works. The key to the orchestra’s success would be its acceptance by the residents of the National Capital Region, and plans were under way to secure this bond.

The previous fall, another top arts professional had been persuaded to join the Art Centre team. Mary Jolliffe, an exuberant, red-haired, frank-talking, sometimes hard-drinking enthusiast, was one of the best public-relations experts in the business. She had built her reputation with companies ranging from Stratford and the O’Keefe Centre to New York City, where she had worked with the Metropolitan Opera on various projects, including tours of its national company, and she was an old friend of Bruce Corder’s from O’Keefe Centre days. She was yet another of the arts veterans who was completing a brilliant turn as PR director for cultural affairs at Expo 67. When it became obvious that the connections of the first public-relations director, Laurent Duval, were too limited for the job ahead, he decided to leave, and Corder telephoned Jolliffe to invite her to Ottawa. In hiring Jolliffe, the pitching of the National Arts Centre would move from what had been a “modest small-town venture” into the international big leagues.¹¹ If Southam wanted to put the NAC on the map, he could not have found a better person.

By March 1969, with opening night just over eight weeks away, David Haber was now the head of programming and in charge of the opening festival. Construction of the building was at last edging to completion. The turnover date was set at May 31, 1969, with the first performance slated to follow two days later on June 2. Haber had Southam’s support for his plans for the opening events: the real celebration would occur when the curtain went up on the first performance in each of the three halls.