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7 FESTIVALS AND FINANCING

Music, theatre, and dance were not the only items on Southam’s vast agenda as the National Arts Centre moved into the early 1970s. He also negotiated with the Board of Trustees on the centre’s financial affairs, kept up a stream of communications through memorandums and meetings with an assortment of government officials, and smoothed the way with the politicians by judicious appearances before the Parliamentary Standing Committee. Above all he turned again to one of his central interests—the Summer Festival—part two of the government’s original approval for the Arts Centre.

The initial attempt at a festival had been slated for the summer of 1970, but had been stopped by the board in late August 1969 for lack of funds. That first plan had been hugely ambitious. The Festival would begin on July 1, Dominion Day, as it was then called, and run for a month in Ottawa. It was to have a wide range of attractions, some of which would be run by other government departments, such as the folkloric festivities on Parliament Hill to be presented by amateur ethnic dance and singing groups from around the country. Others, including a possible raftsmen’s festival on the Ottawa River or excursion trips into the Gatineau Hills for outdoor concerts, were to be organized by the City of Hull or the CBC. The goal of all these activities was to make Canada’s capital even more attractive during the summer when it was inundated with thousands of visitors from Canada and abroad. The inspiration for the idea was the Edinburgh Festival, and, like it, the key attractions would be the music, dance, and drama performances that, in this case, would be produced at the NAC.

In planning this first projected Festival, Southam had travelled extensively, visiting London and Paris and touring Europe from Paris to Prague to view performances that might find a potential audience in Ottawa, He had laid the groundwork meticulously for what he conceived as a major national and international event in Ottawa based on a suitable theme: “an exploration of the encounter and mutual enrichment of the cultures of the English- and French-speaking worlds.”¹ Having ready access at the highest political levels in both France and England, he had met and dined with the most senior cultural figures, including French culture minister André Malraux and the minister for the arts in the United Kingdom, Jennie Lee. As a former diplomat, Southam knew how to pull the ropes, and his formidable and elegant presence made him an excellent envoy on behalf of the arts.

Particularly delicate had been his inquiry in Paris, where the fallout from President Charles de Gaulle’s hasty exit from Quebec during Expo 67 was still fresh in people’s minds. As his report to the board later revealed, he had beguiled the cultural ministers in both of Canada’s founding countries by inviting them to become patrons of such a festival. Malraux, who perhaps saw an opening for further inroads in Canada in these politically volatile times, took special note, indicating that he would pursue it with his government and consider coming to the event himself if that was approved. Jennie Lee wrote Southam a friendly personal letter saying that though she would likely be out of office by the time the Festival happened, she would ensure that it continued to receive full support. She labelled her efforts-to-be “a friendly conspiracy” between the two of them, and assured Southam that he would likely get what he wanted from the British. Just to be sure, Southam had hired Lord Harewood, the former director of the Edinburgh Festival, in London, and Albert Sarfati in Paris as consultants to line up the European talent (see chapter 2). Harewood, one of the Queen’s first cousins, would remain a lifelong friend, becoming godfather to one of Southam’s children.

All these plans came to naught when the 1970 Summer Festival was cancelled, although some of the ideas would resurface in future festivals in Ottawa. In the aftermath of Expo, cultural spending was beginning to slow down, and officials in the Secretary of State’s department and at the Canada Council gave a chilly reception to spending an estimated million dollar budget on bringing largely foreign talent to Ottawa—even if it was “the best.”

Canada passed through a horrific storm in the fall of 1970 with the October Crisis. The imposition of the War Measures Act, which was quickly invoked by the Trudeau government to halt a possible civil insurrection, had seen the leafy streets of Ottawa’s Rockcliffe Park, where Southam and many of the country’s leaders and foreign diplomats lived, filled with army personnel in full battle gear. The aftermath of these events would have an impact on the way the national government would conduct its affairs in the future, especially in its deployment of cultural resources. In the immediate term, the crisis forced increased security around the NAC building, at a cost of $1,500 to the budget. More important was a sea change in outlook that Southam articulated later—that “something cracked” in this period.²

Just weeks before the crisis, the trustees had given Southam a cautious green light to explore the Summer Festival concept once again. He lost no time in getting together with Bernardi, and they began to devise a far more modest but still exciting plan that involved using leftover time in the orchestra’s contract and tapping into Bernardi’s wide experience with opera. Their decision was to build the Festival around what would be the NAC’s first opera production. They selected Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, a work that was tailor-made for Bernardi. The maestro, proficient at the keyboard as well as on the podium, agreed to play the harpsichord for the recitatives throughout the opera. Together, they intended this first effort to be the template for bigger Festivals in the future.

Once again, Southam moved carefully to implant the Festival idea in people’s minds, working up the same wave of enthusiasm that had helped to create the Arts Centre. On March 8, 1971, I. Norman Smith, the editor of the Ottawa Journal and a good Southam friend, editorialized that “Ottawa could be the Edinburgh of America” and that Mario Bernardi, as “a director of both music and opera,” was “a man of the future.” “We are young and gay,” he proclaimed, as he urged Ottawans to enter into the spirit of the times and rhapsodized about the possibilities for Ottawa with the Festival. He envisioned activities ranging all the way from classical music at the Arts Centre to the raftsmen’s event on the river, even as he endorsed bus tours and fishing events in the beautiful Gatineau Hills across the river in Quebec. It was not hard to detect the hidden enthusiast behind Smith’s pen.

In April, board chair François Mercier proudly announced the details publicly. The Festival would be a “panoply of the arts,” he said, with five performances of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro directed by Sir Tyrone Guthrie and with a Canadian cast that included Claude Corbeil, Allan Monk, Judith Forst, and Heather Thomson.³ Four concerts by the Arts Centre orchestra were planned, featuring four new Canadian works, and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet would present a spectacular dance based on George Ryga’s play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. French theatre would be included by a Théâtre Rideau Vert production of Tremblay’s Les Belles Soeurs, directed by André Brassard. Chanteuse Monique Leyrac and the popular duo Ian & Sylvia would satisfy popular culture fans, and the aboriginal singer, storyteller, and composer Alanis Obomsawin was also booked for her own show. These events were but a taste of the feast planned throughout July, and it was all to be followed by a “Young August” program at the Arts Centre aimed at younger people, featuring young artists, rock bands, and other popular groups.

This clever recipe for programming seemed to cover all the touchstones of a stirring Canadian identity that was receiving growing emphasis within the national government. Some 500,000 brochures were printed and distributed across the country and into the United States to entice would-be visitors. When Southam was asked by the press how much it would cost and who would pay for it all, he airily replied, “We have the money—we had a good year.”

On July 1, 1971, all Southam’s ingenious manoeuvrings to launch the Summer Festival and ensure its development paid off. The Art Centre’s first in-house opera production, The Marriage of Figaro, was an enormous success, even though director Michael Geliot had been forced to step in as stage director at the last minute because of the sudden and unexpected death of Sir Tyrone Guthrie in March. The sterling, almost entirely Canadian cast of singers, Bernardi’s exquisite playing as he conducted the orchestra from the harpsichord during Mozart’s recitatives, and the splendid lavishness of the production combined to make it clear that the overall first-class standards already established at the NAC would also include opera on a grand scale. Designer Brian Jackson, assisted by Suzanne Mess, had created a gorgeous set and magnificent costumes. No expense had been spared. Among the many high points that delighted the audience, none was more exciting than the moment when the curtains parted for the final act to reveal a water-filled pond at centre-stage with an elegant troupe of live swans swimming in it. In later years, singers would recall with horror the menacing hiss of the swans when a performer came too close. A special swan-keeper, dressed as a peasant, remained on stage throughout the act to keep the lovely but threatening creatures under control. “They were vicious!” Bernardi would later recall, but the overall effect was audacious and thrilling.⁴ Hugh Davidson, who arrived in Ottawa to take up his post assisting the maestro just in time for the opera, remembers it as a “glorious and brilliant production.”⁵

Claude Corbeil, Gwenlynn Little, and Heather Thomson here performing in The Marriage of Figaro were among the first of many Canadian singers who bloomed in the operas presented in the Summer Festival. Photo © John Evans.

Mozart’s music was Bernardi’s forte and, with this venture into opera, the Arts Centre, the orchestra, and the conductor himself began to come into their own in the rarefied world of opera. Mozart operas would become a cornerstone of the early summer festivals, and the quality of the work spread word of the Arts Centre far and wide throughout the musical world. Most of the orchestra players welcomed the chance to play in the pit for these performances, and, indeed, another dimension of communication was opened between them and their taskmaster maestro when he sat down to conduct and play at the harpsichord. “It was as if he was talking to us though the music in a way he couldn’t when he was just on the podium,” reflected one player years later.⁶ The musicians admired Bernardi for this work, and the feeling was mutual.

For Southam all of the proceedings were a natural progression. Opera was the “sum of everything,” he believed, and “you couldn’t have a National Arts Centre without it.”⁷ He had persuaded the government to build the second finest opera house in North America after the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and he intended to have it used. After this first successful summer, he was more determined than ever to create a full-fledged Festival in Ottawa with opera at its core. The plan was to make Canada’s capital “Edinburgh-on-the-Rideau” and, to this end, Bruce Corder and several trustees travelled to the Scottish city before the next summer to pick up tips. Lord Harewood had been hired to prepare a report on opera in Canada, and, when it was published in 1972, it identified “Ottawa as key to opera in Canada.” The success of the first summer, especially in uncovering so many opera fans in Ottawa, allowed a happy Southam to exclaim to a Canadian reporter during a Paris interview in June 1972: “I felt like a prospector wandering over the Canadian Shield, taking a crack at a rock and uncovering gold.”⁸

There was more gold to come when the 1972 Summer Festival brought a repeat of Figaro, this time without live swans but sung in the original Italian, as well as a new production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte. This event marked the debut of the noted Canadian-born dancer and choreographer Brian Macdonald as an opera stage director. Bernardi envisioned the work as “very balletic. After all,” he said, “it’s about three pairs of people. I could see some kind of choreographic nexus there.”⁹ Macdonald was the right man for the task, although it took him time to work out each scene, as he had first to learn and then become immersed in the technicalities of the music as rehearsals moved forward. The result was good, and the Bernardi/Macdonald duo would team up often on other operatic and musical works in the years ahead, many of them at the Arts Centre. Again, Canadian artists dominated the cast, the public was delighted, and the reviews were good.

The rest of the Summer Festival month was like “Expo year in miniature”¹⁰— a performance by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, four orchestral concerts (one of them conducted by the distinguished British composer Sir Michael Tippett), recitals by classical pianist Harvey Van Cliburn and jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, a French play from Montreal, and two English plays: Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, brought from London by the Young Vic Company. Added to this was entertainment on the lighter side—performances as diverse as the Québécois boy-singer René Claude and, in the Studio, the new Canadian satirical group The Jest Society. For the first time, chansonniers were booked into the Café to entertain patrons after dinner. Yet, somehow, this second Summer Festival fare did not quite gel. Tickets sold spottily, with only about 20 percent going to visitors from outside the region. The opera sold well, however, and, while overall attendance was down from the first year, revenues for the July summer events were up by 20 percent.

Despite the interest in youth, “Young August” had proved a hard sell, even with its rich all-Canadian menu. It featured everything from Canadian comedian Rich Little (who did play to packed houses), to Jeunesses Musicales, Toronto Dance Theatre, and plays in both English and French by students of the National Theatre School. Overall capacity for August, despite much favourable comment, hit just 60 percent. In the eyes of some observers, “ideal festival programming for Ottawa was still elusive.”¹¹ Nevertheless, NAC management came out of the summer with the view that the Festival was now well grounded, and Southam immediately began ambitious plans for the third Summer Festival.

Meanwhile on the government front, a great deal was happening as Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier began to set in motion the initiatives that would dramatically affect cultural funding in the country. At his side was an astute bureaucrat, André Fortier, who, as a more junior official, had been associated with the NAC’s beginnings and was now assistant undersecretary in the Secretary of State’s department and a confidant of Pelletier. Together they initiated a formal Federal Cultural Policy Review, to be overseen by Fortier. Already, Fortier had been assigned to chair an interdepartmental “Canada Month” committee that would work to focus attention on Canada’s capital during the summer. The NAC would have to manoeuvre skilfully to finesse its plans into this new broader picture being developed by the government.

Pelletier had strong views on the place of young people in society and had articulated a notion that “youth” was “an independent universal class, culturally and socially distinct.”¹² At the same time, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec was becoming considerably less quiet, driven in large measure by youthful disaffected voices and sometimes reaching explosive proportions, as seen in the tragic events of the October Crisis. One of the federal government’s responses was to launch the Opportunities for Youth program in 1970, followed the next year by the Local Initiatives Program. These plans not only enabled the government to get money more directly out to constituents but also tied in with Pelletier’s objectives to “democratize and decentralize” culture. Many of the projects that received funding under these programs were in the artistic and cultural sector. The hugely successful Cirque du Soleil, for example, began with an Opportunities for Youth grant to two street buskers working in the lower Gaspésie.

These programs also had the effect of circumnavigating some of the grant-giving powers of the traditional funding agencies, such as the Canada Council and, more recently, the National Arts Centre, whose support was directed exclusively to professional artists. Both Southam and Louis Applebaum wrote to Pelletier expressing their concerns over the effect of these new granting programs and stressing their opinion that “federal support should be aimed at the professional level … and … support of semi-professional or amateur activities should be left to the regional or municipal levels of government.”

Pelletier’s department began to slash what were known as “B” budgets in these cultural agencies’ financing, in part to underwrite, but also to have more control over, the new programs. “A” budgets were designed to establish the base operating budgets for the established cultural organizations, and “B” budgets were the additional wish list of items they would like to do if the Treasury Board granted them extra funds. These discretionary funds were not just left to bureaucrats to administer but could be the subject of some heavy discussion and horse-trading around the Cabinet table. Pelletier and his close colleagues now intended to use some of this money and these tools to effect social change—and to a significant extent they would succeed.

Pelletier also wanted a single unifying cultural policy for the country, to be set and run by the government. Until now, each of Canada’s cultural agencies had a general mandate, and they had generally been left to operate as they saw fit. Starting with Pelletier, they would come under greater departmental control. The minister travelled to a UNESCO conference in Venice in 1970 where the concept of a national cultural policy was adopted by a majority of member countries, even though some doubters expressed fears that “cultural expression would be stifled under the weight of bureaucracy.”¹³ At a second conference in Helsinki in 1972, Canada drew closer to the European/French model of a Ministry of Culture, with its state (as opposed to “arm’s-length”) control of public funds for cultural affairs. In part, the goal of this change was to build a better bulwark against the cultural power of the United States, which was flooding Canada and other parts of the world largely through American television programs and film. Canada’s more proactive stance in cultural activities abroad was intended to reinforce its differences from the United States.

Soon after, Pelletier instituted certain measures that broke with the tradition that Canada’s arm’s-length cultural agencies were responsible for administering arts programs.

The “capital assistance program,” which made money available to build cultural facilities, was moved into the Arts and Culture Branch of Pelletier’s department, where it remains today. The Canada Council had declined to take it on “because of the inevitable political implications surrounding the bargaining for and the selection of capital projects.”¹⁴ Giving this grant-giving power to the department itself contributed to the tensions that would grow between the ministry and the regular grant-giving federal cultural agencies.

Previously, the cultural agencies had not only set their own agendas but had also operated independently from one another. It was only with the establishment of the National Arts Centre that other agencies, including the Canada Council, the CBC, and the National Film Board, had been given ex-officio places on the board, so they could liaise with one another and try to work in consort where appropriate. Pelletier thought that there should be a common direction among the agencies, and that this objective should be established by the government. With the challenges of national unity mounting, the government wanted all the tools it could get at its disposal to fight separatism in Quebec. Pelletier firmly believed that all the cultural agencies should now be grouped within a national cultural policy under the government’s control. The fight for freedom of cultural expression, how it was to be supported and who would control it, would resonate through the years into the present day.

To his credit, Pelletier wanted to engage the energies of governments at both the provincial and the municipal levels in his quest to spread the opportunities to produce art and cultural events. The ability to allow the provinces to undertake “educational” television was one of the early measures reflecting these principles—with André Fortier as one of Pelletier’s chief negotiators.

So far as the National Arts Centre was concerned, Pelletier had shared his doubts about the institution and its director with Fortier. Their view of Southam was that “his attitude and way of doing things were those of an aristocrat,” an elitist, and his style of living grated on them.¹⁵ Most unfairly, they judged him as “doing something for himself and his friends at the Arts Centre, which looked more like an extended private club.”¹⁶ Southam, as we have seen, had a different view of elitism. He was not against democratizing the arts, but his vision was rooted in the concept of “centres of excellence,” and he firmly believed that these institutions could not be created by governments but occurred where “the arts were started by people and then encouraged.”¹⁷ It had been broad-based coalitions of the general populace, after all, that had created institutions like the CBC and the Canada Council—headed, it is true, by leading citizens who were often, though not exclusively, anglophone.

There is no question that the two sides had decidedly different approaches, but the extent to which this conflict was affected by social rather than ideological factors— the francophones’ aggravation at Southam’s “airs and graces” versus Southam’s often patrician way of viewing the world—is hard to calibrate. Southam’s mannerisms indeed put Pelletier’s back up and, in his memoir published in the 1990s, he remarked on his distaste for the “long gowns and white gloves” approach that he thought the NAC represented.¹⁸ Southam, in turn, would later describe Pelletier as “well educated but not a man of the world” and as a “scatterer of the wealth.”¹⁹ No love was lost between the two men.

While their differences were perhaps rooted in their individual starts in life, their views were also affected by their differing postwar experiences of providing art to the masses. Like Maynard Keynes in England, Southam had a view of what was “the best,” and he thought it his duty to present these performances to Canada and so raise cultural standards in the country. That “best” should be not only Canadian but from abroad, such as the Comédie Française or England’s National Theatre. He had been raised as an internationalist and believed that Canada had a larger role to play in the world, and not just within its national borders. In his mind, the NAC had been born into that international context. Pelletier, in contrast, subscribed more to the community-based French view, and he and Fortier privately thought the concept of the NAC “too old-school European.”²⁰ By strictly theoretical standards, their position was more democratic and their charge of elitism stung Southam, although there was really no difference between the goals of the two camps—they both wanted to increase access to the arts for individual artists and the public alike.

Pelletier did not fully appreciate Southam’s quick-witted and shrewd diplomatic skill at adapting to and managing the evolving political situations. In this respect the director general was the consummate politician on behalf of the NAC. As Pelletier’s work began to build up steam, in March 1971, the NAC board, which held the power of appointment, renewed Southam’s contract as director general for another five years. Southam said later that, had it been in Pelletier’s power, he believed he would have been let go. Board chair François Mercier, with strong ties to the Liberal Party and the Trudeau government, liked Southam enormously, however, and he dealt with the reappointment expeditiously.

Nothing illustrated Southam’s adroit management skills more than the financing for the early summer festivals. There, he picked up on the government’s urgent new interest in issues of “national unity” and began to re-tailor his requests to fit this new paradigm. There might be less money from Treasury Board for “B” budget items, but there was going to be new monies for “unity” projects. The NAC had already sent in an impressive “B” budget shopping list that included the first mention of a possible resident dance company, based on a proposal from choreographer Brian Macdonald, as well as plans to bring Opéra Québec to Ottawa and to develop a National Booking Office that would service the whole country. Southam had no difficulty recasting the NAC as a useful player in the national unity cause. He had always believed strongly in Canadian unity– and the role that the National Arts Centre could play in bringing Canadians together.

In the fall of 1970, the NAC again proposed the Festival Canada idea to the government for the summer of the following year, this time fitting its own plans neatly into the national unity project. Southam took nothing for granted, and, in May 1971, he made a carefully prepared appearance before the Standing Committee of Parliament. There he stressed to the parliamentarians the NAC’s role in the entire country, firmly rejecting the notion that it was a project only for the citizens of Ottawa. Rather, he sketched out for the country’s representatives the good things that the Arts Centre could do, and was doing, for Canada, including “commissioning new works to perform at the NAC,” “making the capital a centre of creation and attraction,” and “developing itself as a ‘national service centre’ for the performing arts, as in the proposed National Booking Office being designed to serve the arts companies of the entire country.” At the same time, he smoothly reminded the politicians that the NAC would need new money to achieve these goals. His message resonated with the authorities and, while the NAC generally funded the first Festival from its own funds, it implanted itself firmly as a major component of “Canada Month,” a pet project initiated by the Secretary of State’s Department.