I’ve been following the development of MISSING; an opera with text by Marie Clements and music by Brian Current since early 2017. There’s an article principally about the project in the Summer 2017 edition of Opera Canada. But I’ve yet to see the opera on stage. It’s had multiple productions in Western Canada but this July will see it’s first performance east of the Lakehead when Toronto Summer Music present it in concert format. That’s at Koerner Hall on July 24th.

Marion Newman in MISSING at Pacific Opera Victoria – Photo: Dean Kalyan

I think it’s an important milestone in Canadian opera history. To the best of my knowledge it’s the first opera to contribute directly to Reconciliation and it does it as some theatre pieces have done by taking a dark and deadly serious subject; in this case Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls, and presenting it in a way that, while not pulling any punches, makes good theatre rather than a lecture. A fair comparison would be with the way Jani Lauzon treated Residential Schools in her excellent and award winning play 1939.

In MISSING we see the evolution of the relationships between three women and the people around them. The pivot is Ava, a Settler woman (sung by TSM staffer Caitlin Wood!) who, in the aftermath of a serious car crash sees (or thinks she sees) the body of a recently murdered Native Girl. The spirit or ghost or what-you-will of the Native Girl repeatedly appears to Ava who is simultaneously influenced by Indigenous law professor Dr. Wilson.  Ava’s psychological and spiritual journey takes her further into the world of the Native Girl which, coupled with life events like marriage and giving birth, finally lead to a form of reconciliation with the dead girl’s mother and brother and closure for the Native Girl. It’s a complex story taking place on both physical and meta physical levels which seems to make it particularly apt for opera.

Despite not having seen the opera live I have had access to a pre-release copy of the CD recorded earlier this year by (essentially) the cast who will perform at Koerner. You can read a review of that in June’s La Scena Musicale.  I’ll post the link when it is).  The CD comes out in early July. Anyway, musically it’s a treat. It’s a colourful, accessible score for an ensemble of violin, cello, flute, clarinet, piano and percussion. It’s obviously contemporary music but in a good way. It’s mostly quite light textured and complex enough without overwhelming the vocal line which is always clearly distinguishable; you will have no problem with the English bits but there will be surtitles for the text that’s in Gitxsan.

The performers are, for the most part, the ones who created the piece and have lived with it through it’s development and evolution including workshopping with Gitxsan elders and family members of MMIWG. There’s a sense of authenticity. The cast is all Canadian; roughly 50/50 Indigenous and Settler and includes singers like Marion Newman (host of CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera), Melody Courage and Asitha Tennekoon. It’s conducted by Tim Long who is one of the USA’s leading Indigenous musicians, He’s worked at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and was recently the subject of a substantial profile in the New York Times.

This will be a “concert performance” i.e. it will be performed like an oratorio with no blocking but there will be projections which will help with the story telling.  It’s perhaps not ideal way to do the piece but it doesn’t bother me too much. Some operas suffer from concert staging more than others and MISSING strikes me as one where the visual element is less vital because i’s more about psychology and ideas than action. There’s also the issue of the dead Native Girl. Dealing with “ghosts” on stage is tough. I’ve never seen a production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, for example ,that managed to fully convey the ambiguity of the original Henry James story!

It’s taken way too long for such an important Canadian opera on such a “now” topic to make it to Toronto. It deserves to be supported.