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