There were non-artistic matters to deal with as well. Southam had discovered during his time in Sweden that the best restaurant in Stockholm was at the Swedish Opera. Good dining and good theatre had always gone hand in hand in his mind, and he firmly believed that “more things were wrought by a good lunch than others dreamed of.”6 The local property developer William Teron had experience building hotels in Ottawa. He had helped Southam out by taking over the National Capital Arts Alliance when Southam had no further use for the organization, and by way of thanks Southam had assisted his appointment to the new board of the NAC. Teron was considered the “house” expert in restaurants and given the job of exploring the catering requirements for the centre. Here, again, Southam knew what he wanted. After a particularly delightful dinner at the famous Paris restaurant Chez Maxim’s—an august operation that had also been part of the French Pavilion at Expo 67—he had fleetingly toyed with the idea of inviting this establishment to come to Ottawa to look after catering at the Arts Centre. Although the idea came to nothing, his ambitious thinking would lead to the inclusion of a grand restaurant at the centre. Unfortunately, provincial Ottawans would take a long time to develop the habit of dining at expensive restaurants, and the food service at the NAC became a millstone that dragged down the NAC’s bottom line through the early years.
Another extravagant plan dreamed up in this first year and indicative of the trustees’ eagerness to plunge into some artistic endeavour was the creation of a mobile theatre, a travelling truck known as Le Portage, which would tour through the Ottawa region. Modelled after the trailer-trucks that were touring Canada with Centennial exhibitions, this project would eventually turn into an expensive folly and end its days in a cornfield a hundred miles east of Ottawa. The problem was the ingenious but costly design that called for the side of the truck to fold down and become a theatre stage. Before the trustees could learn enough about costs, the price for designing and building this concept had run away with them. Still, during the year or two that it functioned, it toured theatre throughout the Ottawa Valley on both sides of the river, heralding the art that was coming soon to the permanent new stages.*
Towards this goal, the Arts Centre continued to hire talented staff, including some of the best and most experienced theatre people in the country. Many were ready to embrace a grand new initiative after their work on the hugely successful cultural festival at Expo, which, as it drew to a close, was generally agreed to be one of the greatest collections of artistic excellence presented anywhere in the world. In addition to David Haber, staff joining the NAC included Andis Celms, Expo’s talented technical administrator, now hired to manage technical affairs in the NAC’s theatres. Celms would stay on for the next thirty years, rising to become head of the Theatre Department and, finally, if briefly, senior artistic director. Box-office expert Ted Demetre, a quiet-spoken but front-of-house wizard, also signed on. He had saved the day at Expo when the fancy electronic ticket machines had broken down at the beginning of the festival, and he had doled out thousands of tickets by hand to ensure that people got into the early performances. He too would have a remarkable career at the Arts Centre, putting his talents to work for many years in the Variety and Dance Department, a consistent money-maker for the NAC coffers which helped subsidize the more esoteric art forms. Both men would spend the bulk of their careers at the Arts Centre, becoming indispensable team players.
Le Portage, the mobile theatre that was the new board’s first venture into the actual arts, proved an expensive venture. Photo © John Evans.
Behind all the dreams and plans, vigorous efforts were ongoing to get the NAC’s financial house in order and to make long-term arrangements to secure the necessary financial support from the government. Southam used his contacts at the cultural agencies and at senior levels of the Treasury Board to work on the budget, while, in-house, Bruce Corder wrestled with schemes to make both the parking garage and the commercial space allocated for shops along Elgin Street into sources of funds for the new centre. Southam and his board estimated that they would need at least $2.5 million from the government for each of the first two years’ operations, plus an additional $1 million for the Festival, which they hoped to launch in the summer of 1970.
At the September 1967 meeting, board members finally settled on the official name for the centre. After three years of discussion, they rejected Southam’s romantic notion of calling the place “Les Rideaux”—a name that evoked for him his summer estate in the Rideau Lakes—choosing instead the National Arts Centre. The name translated nicely, although Southam grumbled that it had “a dull, institutional ring.” At the same time, the board threw out the potentially contentious idea of naming the various halls after famous Canadians, opting instead for the generic labels of “Opera,” “Theatre,” “Salon,” “Studio,” and even “Le Restaurant” and “Le Café”—names that would stick almost all the way through the NAC’s first thirty-five years. In 2000, Southam “succumbed to the temptation” to allow the Opera to be named after him and it has since been known as Southam Hall.7
While government officials worked on the structure and organization of the new centre, other supporters were preoccupied with arranging its artistic content. It is impossible today to imagine a small group of citizens agreeing to work together to establish an arts centre of the scope and complexity of the National Arts Centre, and then to go on to build the orchestra, theatre, and opera that would perform in it. Yet, incredibly, that is what Southam and his colleagues set out to accomplish.
Nothing was more carefully thought out or pursued than the creation of the National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO). Credit for this achievement must go to a handful of dedicated music professionals who mostly had their careers at the CBC, the National Film Board, or a university. These men were determined to improve the place of music in Canada, and in the postwar period their ideas were allowed to flourish.
For almost two decades, there had been a reasonably well-functioning symphony orchestra in Ottawa, most recently under the leadership of concertmaster Eugene Kash, then married to the exuberant mezzo-soprano Maureen Forrester. In the late forties and fifties, the Ottawa Philharmonic had been the first orchestra in Canada to introduce a series of children’s concerts, but the orchestra had foundered in 1960 over problems with the musicians’ union. The resulting musical gap in the capital had been filled by seasonal visits from both the Toronto Symphony and the Montreal Symphony orchestras. As the National Capital Arts Alliance prepared its study on a possible future performing arts centre in the city, it presented little hope for a new symphony orchestra in the region. Perhaps “after the Centre was built and Ottawa’s population increased,”8 it mused, a new orchestra would stand a chance. In the meantime, the visiting orchestras could fill the gap.
This kind of thinking changed dramatically once the Arts Centre planners were ignited by Jean Gascon’s early statement that “the new centre must have a heart that beats.”9 Although it was an audacious move in the eyes of the country’s established musical community, the members of the music committee quickly decided that there must be a new orchestra. With Louis Applebaum in the chair of this stellar group, Southam was receiving advice from some of the country’s most notable musical thinkers. The gregarious Applebaum had been a moving force in Canadian music from the early fifties, working extensively at the CBC and the National Film Board, composing music for productions at both organizations, and developing a broad and rich music program at the Stratford Festival. (Eventually he would even become a senior arts bureaucrat.) Now, in his May 1965 report for a music program at the new Arts Centre, he wrote: “A good orchestra is called for. A superb one would be more to the point.”
The idea for a small chamber-sized orchestra had been initially suggested a year earlier by the CBC’s Jean-Marie Beaudet—another consultant to the Arts Centre and ex-officio member of the music advisory committee. He played a crucial role in figuring out the practical details and, by October 1964, his thoughts had crystallized into a carefully thought-out proposal for a mid-sized ensemble. The plan called