Art and Politics. Sarah Jennings
Southam’s efforts, including many lunches and informal meetings over drinks, the nervous members of what was left of the now-defunct Ottawa Philharmonic’s board of directors still wanted a larger ensemble. That was a worry, given that this local musical cadre would be important to future audience support. Southam exercised all his wiles, introducing them to Beaudet and acquainting them with the budding plans for the smaller group. For once his entertaining efforts failed, and he determined finally to go around them but not without throwing a diplomatic olive branch by arranging for a special paper on “continuing relations with the local community,” a task that was left to William Teron.
By early summer, the creative and far-thinking Jean-Marie Beaudet had been seconded from the CBC to the NAC staff. He joyfully took up the job and never returned to the corporation. He would become the Arts Centre’s first director of music, thereby ensuring that the substance of the orchestra concept and many of the other proposals for music in Ottawa would come to fruition. With the decision on the orchestra looming, Beaudet’s task was to prepare a persuasive briefing paper for the September meetings of the board. This carefully layered and detailed submission presented all the facts and figures that had been worked out in the previous months. While the Toronto/ Montreal pressure continued, with regional MPs and senior Cabinet members now pulled into the fray, the NAC board’s newly created Executive Committee was effectively doing its own lobbying.
Southam, following Hindley’s advice, had forwarded a lengthy memo to Judy LaMarsh which set out in lofty and lyrical terms the case for the arts, and particularly music, in society. Leaving no reference untapped, he ranged across the role of various kings and princes, as well as that of more recent socialist and democratic leaders who had recognized and supported the value of artistic activity in human life. He made lavish references to French culture minister André Malraux and to the views of Mme. Ekaterina Furtseva, a Russian minister of culture who had recently visited Ottawa and dined with LaMarsh. To make sure the Canadian minister got the point, Southam included the interesting information that a socialist government in Austria had rebuilt the Staatsoper in Vienna after the war, even though it was bankrupt. The paper was persuasive, well documented, and clearly stated in Southam’s inimitable style. Critics not on top of their “Ottawa game” found it impossible to refute. Despite her reputation as a populist, LaMarsh, with Prime Minister Pearson behind her, backed the orchestra plan.
Beaudet’s briefing paper to the trustees set out a time-table for the creation of this “national orchestra.” When the board’s Executive Committee met once again in September, members finally faced the music. Although Southam’s memo to the minister and its fulsome references to kings and princes had made some of the trustees nervous— “after all we are living a democracy”—the committee finally grappled with the arguments that favoured the orchestra’s creation.16 In a carefully drafted memorandum, dated September 18, 1967, the recommendation went forward to proceed with a forty-five-member orchestra. At the October meetings, the full board endorsed the plan and sent it on to the minister for Cabinet approval.
This decision became the seminal moment in the creation of the NAC Orchestra. It went on to become, in the later words of one critic, “not merely the best orchestra in Canada but easily one of the best of its kind in the world.”17 Southam had set out to get the best advice he could from some of Canada’s finest arts professionals—Arnold Walter, Louis Applebaum, and Jean-Marie Beaudet—and he relied heavily on Peter Dwyer of the Canada Council for wisdom and insight. Southam’s own ability to listen, his capacity to see an overall vision, and his connections to key people in politics and in the bureaucracy allowed him to push forward one of the great success stories of Canadian arts and culture. By the end of October 1967 the orchestra had been approved by Cabinet, and the next target was to get it up and playing.
Southam was in his element that Centennial summer as he travelled back and forth to Montreal to savour the artistic treasures on offer at Expo: the Swedish Opera, a glorious La Scala production of La Bohème directed by Franco Zefferelli, and lavish lunches and dinners with the “notables” of the cultural scene from all over the world. His diary jottings made careful notes of everything that might have potential for the Arts Centre in Ottawa, and he forged several new friendships with international impresarios, including Albert Sarfati, a Tunisian-born French citizen who was responsible for bringing many of the great European orchestra, dance, and theatrical companies to Expo. He also cultivated an earlier friendship with Lord Harewood,* who had been the director of the Edinburgh Festival and had since taken over the English National Opera. Southam’s dream was to bring not only the best work in Canada to the National Arts Centre but also the best from the international scene. His premise was simple: that exposure to the very best would inspire and develop the arts in Canada. It was a formula that had worked for him. Excellence meant Europe and not the United States, and he would start to work immediately with these two leading arts figures to plan for the 1970 Festival and the NAC’s future. Despite all these exuberant plans, the date of the centre’s opening still remained uncertain as just the latest in a string of delays—a steel strike—once again slowed down construction.
The orchestra might be launched to the satisfaction of all at the Arts Centre, but there was no similar enthusiasm or agreement in the theatre department. Rather, the quarrels and frustrations of the next few years seemed to fulfill playwright Wole Soyinka’s observation that “the most interesting aspects of a play are the actual goings-on behind the scenes, which vary from the hilarious to the tragic.”18 To begin with, the discussions with the Stratford Festival over a possible agreement that would make Ottawa the winter home for the company were still contentious. Stratford’s artistic personnel were unhappy with the idea.19 Although the director, Michael Langham, had originally supported this scheme, he had later decided that he didn’t want the company to go to Ottawa. Rather, he said, it should locate in Montreal, nearer to the National Theatre School. Nevertheless, a formal agreement was signed between the two parties calling for “joint activities” on at least two Shakespearean plays to be performed during the winter season in Ottawa, along with other classics. A joint planning committee of the two professional staffs was established to hammer out the details.
Despite Jean Gascon’s leadership on the theatre advisory committee, Southam was having little luck in attracting anyone from Quebec to head up a French theatre company.20 Vincent Massey had long ago stressed that Canadian sovereignty was at heart a cultural matter, and ideological stirrings in Quebec with the rise of the Quiet Revolution meant that culture there was already developing its Quebec nationalist streak. Quebec theatre was in an exciting ferment, and its leading practitioners were loath to leave Montreal at this time for the outpost of Canada’s capital.
On a hot mid-August day in 1967, Southam travelled to Montreal’s Dorval Airport to meet with Quebec’s leading theatre directors in an effort to resolve the matter. In a private room at the busy airport, he told them in his elegant Parisian French that he was getting nowhere in terms of establishing a French theatre company at the Arts Centre and asked them what he should do. For all his formal airs, Southam always seemed able to strike a chord with artists when he engaged with them, and the luminaries gathered there that day, who, besides Gascon, included Yvette Brind’amour from the Rideau Vert, Jean-Louis Roux, the artistic director at Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, and others, considered his question seriously. Although Roux claims to have been tempted,21 he decided he would prefer to stay in Montreal.
Finally, the group came up with the name of a lesser light in Montreal theatre, a director by the name of Jean-Guy Sabourin. He was seen as “a small fish” who, to the disdain of some, ran only a semi-professional company. He was, however, deeply interested in the role theatre could play in society and its potential for effecting change. He was fascinated by the emerging theories in France for the “democratization of the arts,” which were focused on establishing local maisons de culture, designed to mix professional artists with the local populace to work together in communities.22 Schooled on the old-fashioned traditions of