Quebec lyrical artists shine here and abroad. Performers like Marie-Nicole Lemieux, Karina Gauvin, Hélène Guilmette, Michèle Losier, Julie Boulianne, Nora Sourouzian, Kimy McLaren, Jean-François Lapointe, Étienne Dupuis, Frédéric Antoun, Philippe Sly and Tomislav Lavoie sing today on the greatest world scenes. Directors such as Robert Lepage, François Girard as well as the tandem André Barbe and Renaud Doucet are solicited by the most famous opera houses on the planet. Conductors Bernard Labadie, Jacques Lacombe and Jean-Marie Zeitouni are entrusted with major productions, not to mention our Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who is in charge of the musical direction of the most important opera company in the world, the Metropolitan Opera of New York (Met ).
And what is Radio-Canada doing to recognize this phenomenon, which can only grow with the success of other young artists from here whose careers as performers, directors or conductors are enjoying such great momentum, acting in particular Rihab Chaieb, Marie-Ève Munger, Florie Valiquette, Myriam Leblanc, Magali Simard-Galdès, Catherine St-Arnaud, Klara Martel Laroche, Hugo Laporte, Thomas Oriol, Dina Gilbert and Nicolas Ellis?
The answer came when Radio-Canada’s new radio programming was unveiled on August 15: a significant reduction in the time devoted to opera and opera on these multiple platforms of the public broadcaster. After eliminating opera on the FM band in 2013, what we then called “Requiem for Saturday Opera” in The duty, now the architects of French-language public radio programming are choosing to eliminate opera broadcasts in September, October and November and to deprive operaphiles, as they did this summer, of broadcasts of works lyrical.
No doubt, it will be said in radio-Canadian circles, that we can consider ourselves lucky that the retransmission of the operas of the Met has been maintained. And that we will still be entitled, between December 10, 2022 and June 10, 2023, to the broadcast of 25 operas live from the Met. We should be all the more relieved that there has been thought, in the past, of stopping such retransmissions. Fortunately, Yannick Nézet-Séguin is the musical director there, because the ax would have fallen too – it’s hard not to believe it – on such broadcasts.
New generation of gravediggers
So what will operaphiles from the Quebec and Canadian Francophonie who wish to listen to radio broadcasts of operas on Saturdays, before the start of the Saturday Matinee Broadcasts from the Met? The only possible avenue will be to tune into the English channel of Radio-Canada and listen to the program Saturday Afternoon at the Operaon the air on CBC-Radio 2 or on the CBC-Musica section of the CBC Listen platform, where operas will continue to be broadcast for an entire season… without a summer break, by the way!
Lyricomaniacs will also be able to cross borders — without crossing them — and listen online — but online only — to broadcasts of operas on the BBC and its extraordinary classical music channel Radio 3 (Opera on 3) or on the airwaves of the no less excellent France Musique channel (Saturday at the Opera).
The response of this new generation of gravediggers of the lyric art of Radio-Canada is predictable: a new program has been designed to make the community happy. As we read in the press release presenting the new season of ICI Musique, ” [l]Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. will be marked by the return of everyone’s beloved host, Marc Hervieux, with a new show, When it suits you. It is all these singers of yesterday, today and tomorrow, their stories, their voices, their music and the great artists they have rubbed shoulders with, that Marc Hervieux will tell each week”.
If we can rejoice in the desire to give voice to lyrical singers, we cannot be satisfied with such a consolation prize. This two-hour weekly broadcast will in no way compensate for the loss of the four hours of weekly broadcasting for the five months when the law of silence will be imposed on the broadcasts of lyrical works.
This new puncture will thus deprive us of the possibility of hearing works broadcast in major European festivals, as Sylvie L’Écuyer had accustomed us to. There is also reason to pay tribute to this one for the excellence of a program that has made it possible to hear lyrical singers from Quebec and Canada perform in particular in Aix-en-Provence, Salzburg and Wexford, which her successor, Katerine Verebely, will no longer be able to offer.
From the defunct Chaîne culture to the ephemeral Espace Musique, now passing through ICI Musique, we are witnessing the indefensible and unjust erosion of the place of lyrical art at Radio-Canada. The almost total confinement of opera on digital platforms also says a lot about Radio-Canada’s vision of a musical genre that was born more than 400 years ago, for which opera artists from here shine and to which other public radio stations around the world continue to attach significant importance.
No doubt we must consider in the high spheres of radio-Canada that this music is too scholarly, like classical music in general. Isn’t it also time to revive a real cultural channel and to revive the project of a Radio-Québec which will also make it possible to give back to lyrical art and classical music the place it deserves? ?