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.
On the glamorous but rain-lashed evening of June 2, 1969, when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the other splendidly attired guests arrived for the first performance in the National Arts Centre, they were treated to a new work commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada. Conscious of the honour accorded the company, artistic director Celia Franca had gone to great lengths to ensure a memorable evening. With the bilingual, bicultural nature of the Arts Centre in mind, she had called on her “favourite choreographer in the world,” the Englishman Anthony Tudor, to contrive a ballet based on a story by Voltaire. After months of tinkering, Tudor had informed Franca that he was uninspired and could not produce the work. With only a few months left before the opening, she had turned urgently to another friend in the dance world, the French choreographer Roland Petit. As Franca remembered, she felt out of ideas at this point, so she gave Petit a free hand to pick the work, the music, and the designer for this commission.1
Newly minted Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his companion, Madeleine Gobeil, already appointed to the new NAC board, made a stunning and much-talked-about couple at the NAC’s opening night, June 2, 1969.Photo © Ottawa Citizen/UPI.Reprinted by permission.
The result was Kraanerg, an avant-garde ballet with discordant electronic-sounding orchestral music by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis. The kinetic set was designed by the Hungarian-born, French-based “wizard of op-art,” Victor Vasarely. The dancers, clad in stark white leotards cinched tightly at the waist with wide belts, had struggled hard to learn the steps. No clear discernable melody marked the score, and American conductor Lukas Foss resorted to a metronome and stop-watch to keep the beat. The dancers intensely counted their way through the movements with the aid of their French-speaking ballet master, who stood in the wings calling out the beats: “une, deux, trois.” Ballerina Veronica Tennant recalled the experience as “out of the space age, like being in Star Trek.”2 Still, the elastic geometric manoeuvres would be hailed by the critics, including the demanding dance critic Clive Barnes of the New York Times.
Barnes had been lured to the first night audience by Mary Jolliffe’s energetic international promotion of the new centre as well as the prospect of a new ballet. He later reviewed the evening as “the same sort of disaster as the first night of Swan Lake, shocking on first viewing but with music and dance that will endure.”3 As the two-week opening festival continued, Franca later recalled she could pinpoint the moment when at least thirty to forty patrons would rise in the middle of Xenakis’s discordant music and leave the hall. But on this opening night,