Fifty years of touring hotels and rented halls before it got a real opera house
The Canadian Opera Company
Founded in 1950, the Canadian Opera Company performed for over half a century in shared and retrofitted venues before Toronto finally got a purpose-built opera house in 2006.
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The Canadian Opera Company was founded in 1950, growing out of opera productions staged at the Royal Conservatory of Music, and quickly became the country's leading opera company. For decades it had no home built for opera at all, performing instead in a large multi-purpose venue on Toronto's waterfront — known over the years as the O'Keefe Centre and later the Hummingbird Centre — a hall designed for a mix of touring Broadway shows, ballet, and opera rather than opera's specific acoustic and staging needs.
A real opera house, finally
Long-serving general director Richard Bradshaw, who led the company from 1994 until his death in 2007, pushed hardest for a dedicated opera house, a project realized just before his death when the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts opened in 2006 in downtown Toronto — the first purpose-built opera house in Canada. The company shares the Four Seasons Centre with the National Ballet of Canada, and the building's open, transparent glass staircase became an instant architectural landmark for the surrounding University Avenue area.
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