For a period of time when I was a child, my father and I would set out on our bicycles on Saturday afternoons to tour various used book and antique shops—or junk stores as they were then called—in the Glebe and Centre Town neighborhoods of Ottawa.
One of my favourite shops was an antique store on Third Avenue, just west of Bank Street, called The Gay Blade.
At the time, the term “gay blade” referred to a dashing young man. I don't recall if the proprietor of the shop fit that bill.
I’d paw through the odds and ends in The Gay Blade with the sound of grand opera blaring, broadcast, then as now, on the CBC FM radio show Saturday Afternoon at the Opera.
One weekend we arrived and the shop was silent. My father asked the owner why he wasn't listening to opera.
The owner explained that CBC was broadcasting an Italian opera. Being German-Canadian, he did not think it worth listening to, in fact, he didn't even consider it to be opera.
I was reminded of that incident this week after attending the dress rehearsals of Richard Wagner’s four-part German 19th-century epic Ring Cycle at the new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto.
Sitting through 15 hours of opera in one week seemed a daunting prospect at first, but I wasn’t bored once.
The singing, music, sets and costumes combined to create a spectacular experience. Of the minor characters, I particularly liked the forest bird who helped Siegfried.
It’s been a long time since I’ve sat through rehearsals.
A photographer snapped hundreds of pictures during the performances. I took mainly photos without flash when the lights were up in the house. I didn't risk it during the performances.
During one intermission, I rode the elevator to the top level and walked down floor by floor.
The upper floors are edged with perilous, low glass half-walls which give gut-churning views of the front-of-house foyer on the orchestra level.
Vertigo kicked in on the top floor. Sickened by the altitude, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled to the edge of the precipice to take photos of the view through the glass wall.
A storey lower, on the fourth level, I was told by an usher not to take photos because, she said: "the theatre is under copyright" ~
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