R.I.P. Richard Bradshaw

With the passing of the General Director of the Canadian Opera Company, Canada lost a truly great adopted son, a self-made man of the arts. He built up a world class opera company, complete with a brand new opera house, and did it with minimal support from government. Barbara Amiel writes:

The widespread grief, I think, comes from a different sort of blood relationship and isn’t much of a mystery: the blood in our veins carries not only the vital elements for physical existence but also the oxygen for our souls. Just as there is iron in the soul so there is music, always has been, and that music is a beam on which we ride through the darkness to glimpse something more — in Richard’s case a shortcut to his faith. Losing Bradshaw is akin to losing pints of that blood or being struck down with pernicious anemia.

All around us is a lifeless brew of the mediocre and the bland, of politically correct people and cowards. Bradshaw was the devil to all of that. He couldn’t be bought with honours and lectured the Canadian government on its fear of excellence and faddish definitions of “culture.” In his pitch-perfect homily, the Very Reverend Douglas Stoute remarked that he had routinely been confronted by Bradshaw on the subject of the increasingly “anodyne” nature of modernized Anglican ritual. There was a knowing chuckle among the mourners.

If ever a man came close to dying in childbirth it was Richard. He brought our first national opera house, Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, into life only one year ago after nearly two decades of labour. He fought a ferocious and lonely battle for Canada’s talented young singers and musicians though he himself was a British transplant.

Anyone who saw the excitement on the faces of the high-schoolers last season who came to dress rehearsals free, probably the first opera performance many of them had ever heard let alone attended, knew that Richard was as modern in his desire to be “inclusive” as any breast-beater. There are free lunchtime concerts at the Four Seasons Centre in the aptly named Richard Bradshaw Ampitheatre. Bradshaw despaired over the notion that opera was only for the moneyed set or “elite.” His touch with wealthy donors was legendary but it killed him in the end. If ever a house did, as in D.H. Lawrence’s famous “The Rocking Horse Winner,” cry out “there must be more money,” that cry came from the glass and concrete walls of the Four Seasons Centre.

Having managed to raise the millions it took to build, Bradshaw couldn’t — of necessity — stop there. An opera house needs an operating budget and operating budgets don’t have names on them to attract donors. He despaired over the lack of interest from governments, mouthing platitudes about culture but viewing opera as something vaguely dodgy and certainly politically incorrect — which may go to explain the distinct shortage of officialdom at his funeral.

More on his remarkable legacy, Martin Knelman writes:

Now a more urgent question looms: “How do you replace Bradshaw?”

To which I do have an answer: You don’t.

The Canadian Opera Company’s board will have to do an extensive search to come up with the right person to take over as its general director, and it may have to do another search to come up with the right person to take over as music director and chief conductor.

But it would be folly to look for one person to do everything Bradshaw did. He was a one-of-a-kind superman – not just a great musician and a great CEO but a dazzling politician (we could have used him as mayor), a wizardly money-raiser (capable of seducing even donors who hated opera) and a provocative talker (the liveliest luncheon companion I’ve ever known).

For me, he was also a great source. Even his phone calls were unmissable. Sample: “You didn’t hear this from me but I thought you might want to know the Westons are giving $20 million to the ROM.”

Bradshaw first came to Toronto in 1988 as a guest conductor from San Francisco, where he had been waving his baton for the San Francisco Opera since moving there from the U.K., the only country of which he was ever a citizen.

According to John Fraser, who showed him around on his first visit, Bradshaw almost immediately fell in love with this city. In 1989, he became the COC’s director of music, and in 1994 he was named artistic director when the company was at a low point. Never mind. To Bradshaw this wasn’t just a job; it was his life’s mission to build an opera house. Most people thought he was out of his mind, but Bradshaw didn’t care what most people thought, and he never took no for an answer.

Sometimes his talk was too provocative for cautious colleagues who felt arts workers should be humble beggars. Bradshaw preferred to make sharp remarks. Peers feared he would antagonize power brokers but Bradshaw gambled that controversy would be ultimately more successful than making nice.

Of course he was right. That’s why Toronto has an opera house. Not just any opera house, but an intimate, acoustically perfect opera house where singers, directors and musicians from all over the world are eager to work.

He would like to have had a few years to enjoy leading the great orchestra he shaped in the dream house for which he twisted some of the most distinguished arms in Toronto.

That was not to be. But Bradshaw went out working at the top of his game. Just months after the Four Seasons opened, he scaled the heights of the opera world with a sublime Ring cycle. No wonder he was given the Governor General’s performing arts award and named CEO of the year.

Had he died without achieving all this, the COC might have a hard time finding suitable candidates to take his job. But by giving Toronto a case of opera mania and putting this city on the cultural map, Richard Bradshaw has made his position seem like one of the most desirable arts jobs in the world.