With a recently signed contract that will take his leadership of the COC through to the 2025/2026 season, as well as a new appointment as the Artistic Director of Santa Fe Opera, General Director Alexander Neef is building on his first decade in Toronto by continuing to attract opera’s biggest names to the stage, investing in young artist training like never before, and advancing the conversation about the art form’s relevance and challenges in the 21st century. Interview conducted and condensed by Nikita Gourski.

NG: What’s surprised you the most these last ten seasons?  

AN: How there’s always new potential that opens up for this company, but also for the art form. You never quite come to the end of it. You generate new possibilities and new opportunities through what you do—and I think that’s quite wonderful.

Looking back over the past decade, what are you most proud of?

I think our biggest accomplishment has been to make the COC a major destination for the greatest operatic artists of our time. In a more specific way, we’ve created a very strong Canadian identity for the COC, not only as the biggest opera producer in the country, but a leader internationally. You can see this in our commitment to bringing great and established Canadian artists back to the company, like Gerald Finley, or forming more permanent relationships with them, like our Artist-in-Residence Jane Archibald or the director Robert Carsen. We’ve also made this place a serious launching pad for young Canadian talent.

How has Toronto changed in the time that you’ve been here?

The pace of growth is staggering. I think what’s so exciting about Toronto is that it’s one of the few cities in the Western world today that is still growing and developing. You can build things here. And to be part of that personally, but also as the head of the opera company, is really very exciting.  It doesn’t feel like just administrating the heritage, because Toronto feels like a city of city-builders.

Why is it important for Toronto to have a world-class opera company?

Because it’s part of what makes this city’s cultural infrastructure amazing. It’s not just about opera, it’s about the larger landscape of what Toronto represents.

It’s part of the group of globally important cities, and it needs to be a mecca for culture in all kinds of ways because I think that creates pride, it creates identity and a sense of place in a global context. If you look at New York, for example, people are incredibly proud to be New Yorkers—even though their rent is way too high, they have incredible commute times to work. Despite that, they still want to be New Yorkers. And that’s because there’s a really healthy arts and culture scene—and an arts and culture scene that really functions in aspirational cycles, rather than in a self-contained “it’s good enough” way.

What’s your favourite thing to do in Toronto, excluding the opera?

Well, outside the opera it’s really family time. We like to go to galleries, whether it's Bloor West or the AGO.  

What are your three favourite films?

Lately I watch movies mostly on planes. On the long flights, I usually go with a pile of stuff to read. What I don’t do on planes is Wi-Fi—and I hope there will never be a day when people can actually call you on the plane. Long flights are some of my best quality thinking time, actually. Sometimes watching Wonder Woman is the best thing to focus your thoughts. So that’s how I catch up with the current cinema.

All-time favourite films that I could watch over and over again… one that I’ve been longing to see again for a long time is Les Enfants du Paradis. It’s probably the most remarkable of all the movies I’ve ever seen.

Citizen Kane. How could one not?

And then, the third one, I’d just say “Stanley Kubrick.”

Almost anything. I’m a really big fan of Barry Lyndon, but, I mean, all the other ones too. 

What’s so remarkable about Kubrick is not that he was only a great film director, but the way he used music. Probably there’s no other director who would use existing material in the way Kubrick does, with such extraordinary effect. The Schubert Trio in Barry Lyndon—it becomes this piercing, penetrating score for the time period in which the movie is set, even though the music was composed much later historically. But he manages to create this atmosphere of images matching the music so well. The famous opening scene of Eyes Wide Shut with the Shostakovich waltz; and then you can talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey with Johann Strauss’ “The Blue Danube” waltz and Richard Strauss’ Zarathustra theme.

In a completely different way, I have a big weakness for Visconti movies. I really like Senso because it has this fabulous opening scene at the Fenice in Venice. And I’ll give you one last one, because it was so remarkable out of all of the movies that I’ve seen over the last ten years: Incendies, based on Wajdi Mouawad’s play.

What keeps you up at night?

I try to be done with the thinking by the time I need to go to sleep.

What’s one thing you believed to be true ten years ago, but which you aren’t so certain about today?

Oh, so many things! I guess what you realize all the time is that things are way more complicated than you’d ever thought they’d be, but there’s also way more opportunity in them. With regards to this conversation, I had no idea how difficult it would be to run an opera company in North America and run it at the level we’re operating at.

What would you say is a misperception about you?

Well, I have no idea, I think people think all kinds of things about me, and you never know where they get them from, but I guess that’s true for everyone. If I had to give an answer, I’d say I’m much less serious than people think I am.

How would you describe your taste in art?

I don’t care so much about how it looks or what it is, but I want it to be challenging to me. It maybe has to do with the fact that I don’t have a lot of time, so when I have, two hours, let’s say, when I can really decide what I want to do with that—I want to spend it in a way that is stimulating.

I like big books that take me a long time to read, and then sometimes you might have to read the page twice because it’s difficult. And it’s the same in visual arts. I like paintings that I can spend time with, like a Bosch painting.

And same in music. I don’t really listen to an enormous amount of opera, because I have so much live opera in my life. I usually only listen to opera now if I want to check on something or if I need to study it for one reason or the other—I’d rather listen to chamber music. I listen to a lot of jazz now, too.

From which period are you listening to jazz?

Mostly 50s and 60s, but sometimes I branch out. I like it when it’s acoustic, when it’s not highly manipulated in the recording studio. Real people, playing real instruments, and singing with their real voices.

Changing gears a little bit, why did you decide to renew your contract at the COC?

Because there’s so much left to do. And I feel that maybe I now have an idea of approximately how big that iceberg is.

When you look ahead to the next ten years, what’s the biggest challenge?

Well I think that, not only for us, but for any arts organization in this country, the biggest challenge is to become relevant to a larger number of people.

That has to with do with access and financial barriers, but it’s much bigger than that. It’s about making a case for the centrality of art to our society. Imagine if the vast majority of people really believed that art was inseparable from the health of our country—what would the arts and culture scene in Toronto look like?

If we’re serious about ascribing value to art, we have to recognize that it’s more than just a diversion, that it’s actually formative to our development as individuals and as communities, that it can really make you an independently thinking person. The great thing about interacting with art is that it doesn’t have absolute truths in it, but it teaches us how to come to our own conclusions, how to accept different points of view.

Building a case for the arts is our responsibility, not just so that the COC can exist three generations from now, but because on a more fundamental, organizationally-agnostic level, I think that life without art is not worth living.

What’s the hardest thing about getting people to try opera?

It’s an art form that requires you to spend some money on a ticket, come downtown, and then be there for the larger part of an afternoon or an evening.

And after committing to that experience, you have to trust your own reactions, and overcome the fear of not understanding it, because opera is complex.

On the other hand, precisely because of what opera asks of you, I think it can create an emotional experience that is so much deeper and stronger than almost anything else out there. That’s the point of departure for me. I always like to think that if music causes you to have an emotional reaction, you should try opera.

You’ve been rethinking how the company’s administrative headquarters at 227 Front Street East should interact with its surrounding community and we’ve seen some public programming animating that space, specifically an opera for young audiences, The Magic Victrola, presented last December.

We want that building to become much more open to the street and to the neighbourhood, and to start transforming into a public culture hub that serves and reflects that part of the city. Almost like a grass-roots branch of our operations.

Even though it wasn’t a mainstage performance with orchestra, our Magic Victrola production brought audiences much closer to experiencing what opera is actually about. And looking around at those performances, we had an audience that really reflected Toronto’s diversity and that’s what live theatre should be about—people from different parts of life spending time in a space, holding it together as a shared experience.

What’s surprised you the most these last ten seasons?  

How there’s always new potential that opens up for this company, but also for the art form. You never quite come to the end of it. You generate new possibilities and new opportunities through what you do—and I think that’s quite wonderful.

What’s the last book you read or an art work that you experienced that dramatically changed your thinking on a particular subject?

What continues to amaze me about great works of art is that you’re never done with them, because you revisit them at different stages of your life and those works have become different, because of you—because of what you’ve been through.

Recently, I spent some time at the Louvre in Paris, which I hadn’t done in forever, and it’s not even one work of art… just to see this collection of what humanity is capable of doing, in terms of expression but also self-reflection, and articulating who we are from so many different, surprising perspectives. I think that’s really why artists are so incredibly important—in the old days they would have been considered almost prophets, because they see things that we don’t quite see about ourselves. What’s so great about great art is that usually those people are right. And sometimes we figure that out much, much later.

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Photo: Alexander Neef (2016) Bo Huang.