City in Canada. The largest in the country, it has long been a leader in musical life, challenged only by Toronto. It is a bilingual city (roughly three quarters French- and one quarter English-speaking), and music is one of the few cultural activities that unites and receives support from both language groups.
ERIC McLEAN/HÉLÈNE PAUL
Founded by the French as a missionary outpost in 1642, the early colony was too preoccupied with such basics as shelter, food and defence to pay much attention to cultural development. Music consisted of French folksongs and, in the religious services, some plainchant and a few motets. It was discovered that the Amerindians of the region responded readily to liturgical music, and the latter became a vital tool in their conversion to Catholicism: native children were taught canticles and simple Gregorian chant, with words in the appropriate Amerindian language. A number of musical instruments were brought by the colonists, and particularly by those who were sent to govern them. There are 17th-century references to flutes, trumpets, drums, fiddles, lutes and guitars, which were played in connection with wedding celebrations, government functions and military ceremonies.
Quebec City, founded 34 years earlier than Montreal, was the seat of French government, and secular music developed more rapidly there than in the purely religious settlement of Montreal; however, the commercial and military importance of Montreal – the highest navigable point on the St Lawrence River at that time – soon came to be recognized and exploited, and the town began to lose its exclusively religious character. By the end of the 17th century an imported French organ had been installed in the parish church; the first recorded organist is J.-B. Poitiers du Buisson (1645–1727), who took up the post at the age of 60. Although the existence of secular instrumental music in 17th- and early 18th-century Montreal is confirmed by the records of an occasional ball organized by a government official or a member of the seigneurial class, such activity was discouraged by the Gentlemen of St Sulpice, the seigneurs of the Montreal settlement. Music remained either a folk tradition, barely tolerated by the church, or an instrument of the divine service. The music of the native tribes was not regarded as worthy of notice. A few Amerindian tunes were written down as curiosities in the 17th century, but only when they showed some resemblance to European music.
After the conquest of Canada by the British (1759), the bands of British regiments stationed in the larger towns formed the nucleus of a new and somewhat more active musical life. Army commissions were purchased by the wealthy, and commanding officers vied with each other in the quality of their bands; the musicians, many of them German, seem to have been both competent and versatile. In Montreal they gave regular weekly concerts of about two hours on the old Champs de Mars, and the bands also provided the musicians for the frequent balls held during the winter.
Montreal acquired a French musician of some wit and skill during the American Revolution: Joseph Quesnel (1749–1809), a sea-captain from St Malo captured by a British frigate in 1779 while running supplies and ammunition from France to the USA. After his release he eventually settled in the Montreal area, managing the general store of Boucherville, an adjacent village, and writing songs, chamber operas, and quantities of essays and poetry. One of his operas, Colas et Colinette, ou Le bailli dupé (1788), was performed in Montreal in 1790; it is a pleasant if rather conventional work, owing more to Grétry and Rousseau’s Le devin du village than to Mozart. Quesnel arrived in Canada as a mature musician, and Montreal had as little influence on his work as he had on the citizens of his adopted country. His assessment of the cultural life of the town was not high; in one of his poems, Epitre à M Généreux Labadie, he wrote: ‘At table they sing you an old Bacchic song; in church there were two or three old motets, accompanied by organs missing their bellows’.
In 1848 the first Philharmonic Society was organized in Montreal by an English organist, R.J. Fowler, for the presentation of orchestral and choral works. Fowler’s musical resources must have been severely limited at the time, and the career of the organization was ended abruptly by the great cholera epidemic of 1852. Sporadic attempts were made to organize concerts on a regular basis, but the majority were short-lived. The first group to survive for any length of time was the Montreal Mendelssohn Choir, founded in 1864 and conducted by Joseph Gould (1833–1913), who continued to direct the group of some 100 voices in several concerts each year until the choir’s dissolution in 1894. The extensive collection of musical material acquired by the organization was left to the faculty of music at McGill University.
A few French choral groups enjoyed brief success during the same period: the Société Musicale des Montagnards Canadiens, the Orphéonistes de Montréal (both founded by François Benoit) and the Société Ste-Cécile, founded in 1789 by Adélard J. Boucher. The latter also launched a music publishing business and acted as an impresario for visiting artists.
The development of Boston and New York was much more rapid than that of the French and British settlements in Canada, and by the mid-19th century the musical celebrities of Europe already found it profitable to tour the USA, with brief sallies into the larger Canadian towns across the frontier. In this way Montreal heard such musicians as Patti, Christine Nilsson, Gottschalk, Joseffy, Bülow, Rubinstein, Wieniawski, Vieuxtemps and Ole Bull. In 1850 a touring orchestra from Berlin, known as the Germanians, gave nine performances in Montreal’s Theatre Royal with great success.
The revival of the Philharmonic Society of Montreal in 1875 was an event of great consequence in the development of musical taste in the city. In its 24 years of activity it presented over 120 large orchestral and choral works, many of them for the first time in Canada. Although choral groups were flourishing at this period the formation of an adequate orchestra presented problems; musicians were imported from Boston, Quebec City and Ottawa to supplement the local band for the society’s concerts. The first director of the Philharmonic concerts was P.R. McLagan, succeeded in 1879 by Joseph Gould and Fred E. Lucy-Barnes. In 1880 the direction of the concerts was taken over by Guillaume Couture, who continued to lead the performances until 1899, when the organization suspended its activities. During that period the Philharmonic Society presented such important works as Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus and Acis and Galatea; Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Paulus; Mozart’s Requiem; Haydn’s The Creation and The Seasons; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Christus am Ölberge; a concert version of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer; and the first Canadian performances of Cherubini’s Requiem, Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri and Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila.
Guillaume Couture, who sustained the Philharmonic Society and accounted for much of its success, was the first outstanding Montreal-born musician. In 1873 he was sent by a generous patron to Paris, where he completed his studies with Romain Bussine and Théodore Dubois. He returned to Canada permanently in 1878, and after the failure of the Philharmonic Society in 1899 confined himself to teaching and to his post as organist of the Cathedral of St Jacques. He composed several religious works, including the oratorio Jean le Précurseur, first performed in Montreal in 1923. Several of his pupils contributed significantly to Montreal’s musical development. Another musician of importance in Montreal during the last quarter of the 19th century was the Belgian violin virtuoso Frantz Jehin-Prume, teacher of Ysaÿe and successor to Bériot as violinist to the Belgian king. He toured with the Rubinsteins, Jenny Lind, Esipova and others, and during one of his American visits married the Canadian soprano Rosita del Vecchio. Settling in Montreal in the 1860s, he organized and conducted a number of orchestral and chamber music concerts, exercising considerable influence on the quality of music in the city, both through the imaginative choice of programmes and his professional level of performance. He was also a close friend and supporter of Calixa Lavallée, who composed Canada’s national anthem and was one of the country’s most gifted and productive musicians.
Towards the end of the 19th century a number of attempts were made in Montreal to form a permanent orchestra, the most important being that of J.-J. Goulet, a Belgian violinist who went to Montreal in 1890. He organized the remnants of a short-lived cooperative orchestra founded by Guillaume Couture, and from 1897 was able to sustain a series of four or five concerts annually for more than ten years, under the name of the Montreal SO.
During the 1920s Goulet and J.-J. Gagnier again tried to form a permanent orchestra. In 1928 the latter founded the Montreal Little SO and the Montreal SO, two ensembles that prepared the way for the foundation of the Montreal Concert Symphonic Orchestra (1930–41) and the Société des Concerts Symphoniques de Montréal (1934–).
Following the development of the film soundtrack in the late 1920s many of the pit musicians, who supplied background music and accompaniments for cinemas and vaudeville houses, found themselves unemployed. Their situation was aggravated in 1929 by the financial crisis and subsequent depression. A group of these musicians approached Douglas Clarke, dean of the faculty of music at McGill University, with a view to forming an orchestra with Clarke at its head. The orchestra offered 25 programmes in its first season (1930–31), but this was reduced to 20, then 18, in succeeding seasons. Concerts took place at His Majesty’s Theatre on Sunday afternoons, and the programmes compared favourably with those of other American orchestras.
Clarke, a pupil of Vaughan Williams and Holst, was a well-schooled and perceptive musician. He refused payment for his services throughout the 11-year existence of the orchestra and contributed generously to its collection of scores and parts. He led the musicians through the first Montreal performances of many works now regarded as part of the standard repertory, and he invited leading musicians to take part in the concerts either as guest conductors or as soloists, among them Enescu, Jan Kubelík, Bauer, Zimbalist, Holst and Grainger. In 1934 the board of directors of the Montreal Orchestra split in a dispute with Clarke over the choice of programmes, and the dissatisfied faction, largely French-speaking and led by Athanase David, set up a new series of concerts under the name of the Concerts Symphoniques. Performances were given in the auditorium of the Plateau School; there were a dozen concerts that year, and most of the musicians were those employed by the Montreal Orchestra. Whereas before 1930 there had been no permanent orchestra, by 1935 the community was called upon to support two.
One of the founders of the new concert series was Wilfrid Pelletier, a Montreal conductor on the staff of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. His commitments in New York prevented him from playing a very active role in the direction of the Concerts Symphoniques in the early years, but his association with the organization later became closer, and the quality of performance improved.
An important offshoot of the Concerts Symphoniques was an annual summer festival, first held in 1936, in which Wilfrid Pelletier played a more creative role. These summer concerts began with large choral works, but by 1945 the project had expanded to include opera, ballet, orchestral concerts and theatre in both French and English. Between 1941 and 1944 Beecham conducted a number of the choral performances. The Montreal Festivals enjoyed their greatest popularity during the 1950s, although a notable event was the Contemporary Music Week in July 1961, which attracted leading composers from most Western countries.
Clarke’s Montreal Orchestra was dissolved in 1941, and the Concerts Symphoniques continued alone; in the 1940s the Belgian Désiré Defauw was engaged as artistic director. The rift between the two language groups gradually closed. Programmes became bilingual, and in 1954 the organization was renamed Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal – Montreal SO. Since 1979 it has been known by its French name. Permanent musical directors succeeding Defauw have been Klemperer (1950–53), Markevich (1956–60), Mehta (1961–7), F.-P. Decker (1967–75), Frühbeck de Burgos (1975–6) and Charles Dutoit (1977–). By 1998 the Montreal SO had undertaken 33 national and international tours, most of them under the direction of Charles Dutoit; the orchestra has also made over 75 recordings with Dutoit for Decca, several of which have won international awards.
Since 1981 Montreal has had a second orchestra, the Orchestre Métropolitain. This consists of 65 young musicians, and aims to make great works of the classical and popular repertory available to audiences who do not attend the concert halls in the city centre. It also gives concerts in various parts of the Ile de Montréal and even in subway stations. In 1995 Joseph Rescigno became conductor of the orchestra and chorus of the Orchestre Métropolitain.
In 1940 Madge Bowen and Ethel Stark founded the Montreal Women’s SO. Consisting of 75 instrumentalists conducted by Ethel Stark, the orchestra gave about ten concerts a year until it was disbanded at the end of the 1960s. It was the first women’s symphony orchestra in Canada and the first Canadian orchestra to play in Carnegie Hall, New York.
The first attempt to establish a permanent opera company in Montreal was made in 1910. Generously underwritten by F.D. Meighen, the company was headed by Albert Clerk-Jeannotte, a singing teacher at the McGill Conservatorium. Organized as a repertory company, it mounted 13 operas in its first three-month season, and included a tour of Toronto, Rochester, Quebec City and Ottawa. The personnel numbered as many as 100 instrumentalists and singers, including 23 principals, and was under the musical direction of Agide Jacchia and Louis Hasselmans. Most of the singers were guests (e.g. Leo Slezak and Edmond Clément), but there were several Canadians, some of whom have distinguished themselves abroad (e.g. Beatrice La Palme and Louise Edvina). The theatres of the time were not large enough to make Meighen’s scheme workable; the company was kept afloat for three years, then disbanded just before World War I. For many years Montreal was dependent on occasional visits by the Metropolitan Opera of New York and by smaller touring companies.
Hoping to provide Montreal with a permanent music drama company, Honoré Vaillancourt (1892–1933) founded the Société Canadienne d’Opérette in 1921. From 1923 to 1933 the company presented some 90 works and over 300 shows. Lionel Daunais and Charles Goulet continued Vaillancourt’s work by founding the Variétés Lyriques in 1936. With a repertory made up largely of popular operettas by Friml, Lehár, Lecocq, Messager and others, they won a large public (17,000 subscribers annually), particularly among the French-speaking community. During the next 19 years at the Monument National, the company offered over 1000 performances of 83 works, of which 13 were from the serious opera repertory. With the development of national television networks in the 1950s their audience dwindled, and the company closed at the end of the 1955 season.
Meanwhile, in 1942 the Opera Guild of Montreal was founded with Pauline Donalda as artistic director. The aims of the company were much more modest and realistic than Meighen’s. Beginning with two productions annually, each of which was given two performances, its programme was cut back in 1950 to one opera a year. Local artists were strongly supported, and although most of the operas were chosen from the popular repertory, more adventurous items were included, such as The Golden Cockerel (1944), The Love for Three Oranges (1952), Louise (1953), Boris Godunov (1954), Falstaff (1958) and Macbeth (1959). The musical director of the company for 19 of its 28 years was the Russian conductor Emil Cooper, who had directed the première of The Golden Cockerel in Moscow in 1909. The guild closed in 1969.
From 1964 Montreal’s opera programme was augmented by productions organized by the Montreal SO in collaboration with the directors of the Place des Arts. The quality of performance was high, and opera became a regular feature of the orchestra’s season, supported by additional subsidies from both the Canada Council and the Minister of Cultural Affairs of the Province of Quebec. In 1971, wishing to consolidate its opera investments, the Quebec government formed the Opéra du Québec, which absorbed the opera programme of the Montreal SO as well as a small company in Quebec City, the Théâtre Lyrique de la Nouvelle France. Excellent productions of such works as Otello, Salome, Puccini’s Il trittico and Tristan und Isolde were offered, along with standard repertory, first in the Place des Arts, then in Quebec’s Grand Théâtre. After four seasons the Quebec Minister of Cultural Affairs suspended the operation, which already had an accumulated deficit of more than a million dollars.
The Opéra de Montréal was founded in 1980, taking over from the Opéra du Québec, which had closed in 1975. Two decades after its foundation, with seven annual productions, 10,000 subscribers and average audiences of 85,000, the Opéra de Montréal is among the ten most important opera companies in North America. Although its repertory is mainly French and Italian, the company stages operas of all genres and all periods, including contemporary works. Major productions by the company, which was directed first by J.P. Jeannotte (1980–89) and then by Bernard Uzan (1989–), have included Tristan und Isolde (1986), Dialogues des Carmélites (1989), Adrianna Lecouvreur (1990), Madama Butterfly (1993), The Consul (1995), Turandot (1997) and Jenůfa (1997). The Opéra de Montréal is recognized as the principal opera company in North America for hiring out sets and costumes.
The Little SO, an ensemble patterned on the late 18th-century orchestra, flourished between 1942 and 1951, offering a mixture of classical and modern works. Conductors were engaged on a permanent basis, and they included Bernard Naylor, George Schick, Fritz Mahler and Carl Bamberger. The role of the Little SO was taken over by the McGill Chamber Orchestra, which has continued to offer a popular series of eight concerts each season, first under its founder, Alexander Brott, and since 1990 under Brott’s son, Boris. Basically a string orchestra (it began in 1939 as a quartet), the McGill Chamber Orchestra varies in size from 12 to 25 musicians; its concerts are given in the Théâtre Maisonneuve.
In 1983 Yuli Turovski formed I Musici di Montréal, a string ensemble of 16 musicians. The ensemble has a repertory ranging from Baroque to contemporary works, has undertaken several concert tours and has made a large number of recordings, many of which have received awards. I Musici de Montréal became a permanent ensemble in 1990, and offers its subscribers a season of 48 weeks.
Choral singing is an important part of the musical life of Montreal. Notable choral ensembles since the 19th century include the Mendelssohn Choir (1864–94), the Montreal Philharmonic Society (1875–99), the Montreal Elgar Choir (1922–85), Les Disciples de Massenet (1928–), the Petits Chanteurs de Mont-Royal (1956–), the Tudor Singers of Montreal (1962–91), the Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal (1974–) and the Société Philharmonique de Montréal (1978–).
The Ladies’ Morning Musical Club, founded in 1882, is one of the oldest musical organizations on the continent. Despite the name, the annual 13 recitals and chamber concerts take place in the afternoon and are not confined to ladies. The club has a record of unusual success in finding gifted performers, from Ysaÿe to Ferrier, before their reputations had carried them beyond its financial capabilities. Similar in its objectives is the Pro Musica Society, founded by Constant Gendreau in 1948, which offers eight concerts annually, also at the Théâtre Maisonneuve.
A wide spectrum of the new music is offered by the Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ), founded in 1965. The first musical director was the well-known Canadian composer Serge Garant (1929–86), who trained a basic ensemble of 12 musicians to meet the exigencies of this specialized repertory. Gilles Tremblay succeeded Garant as musical director and held the post until 1988. Since then, under the musical direction of Walter Boudreau, the ensemble has pursued its original aim of promoting new music. Its SMCQ Jeunesse section organizes concerts for young audiences. The ensemble’s headquarters are in the Salle Pierre Mercure of the Centre Pierre Péladeau.
The Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (NEM) was founded in 1989 by Lorraine Vaillancourt, who since then has fulfilled the dual role of conductor and artistic director. This ensemble of 15 musicians is in the residence at the faculty of music of the University of Montreal. It soon made itself a name for excellence and creativity, and it has gone on many national and international tours and made a number of recordings. An offshoot of the activities of the NEM is the journal Circuit (1990–).
By the end of the 20th century Montreal at last had an excellent network of concert halls and theatres. Built between 1960 and 1992, the Place des Arts de Montréal comprises five halls: the Salle Wilfrid Pelletier (cap. 3000); the Théâtre Maisonneuve (1200); the Théâtre Jean Duceppe (823); the Du Maurier Studio Theatre and the Cinquième Salle. As the location of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the headquarters of many musical companies, including the Opéra de Montréal, the Montreal SO, the Orchestre Métropolitain, the McGill Chamber Orchestra, the Pro Musica Society and the Grands Ballets Canadiens, the Place des Arts in the largest multifunctional arts complex in Canada.
Part of the university complex of the Université du Québec à Montréal, the Centre Pierre Péladeau, opened in 1992, contains the Salle Pierre Mercure (cap. 875); its remarkable acoustics and intimate character make it a favourite location for concerts and recordings. Conceived in partnership with the music department of the Université du Québec à Montréal and the Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec, the Centre Pierre Péladeau accommodates the Société Philharmonique de Montréal and the Société de Musique Baroque de Montréal (Les Idées Heureuses). It also co-produces, with CBC, the radio concerts of the Centre Pierre Péladeau, which are broadcast throughout the country.
Other halls in Montreal are linked to the institutions of musical education. The largest is the Salle Claude Champagne (cap. 1600), which is attached to the Ecole Vincent d’Indy; it was opened in 1964. The building, which was owned by the nuns of Les Saints Noms de Jésus et de Marie, was brought by the Université de Montréal in 1980 to accommodate its department of music. Pollack Hall (cap. 600) was opened in the Strathcona Music Building of McGill University in 1975, but designed to meet the needs of the music faculty, its availability to other music organizations is strictly limited. Also on the campus of McGill University, Redpath Hall is used for performances of early music.
There is a flourishing summer festival season in Montreal. The Montreal International Music Competition was founded in 1963 and was the first international music competition in Canada. The first competition (piano) was held in June 1965; the second (violin) in 1966; the third (singing) in 1967. Since 1974 the competition has followed a four-year cycle: violin, piano, singing, and then a rest year. An unpublished Canadian work is compulsory for performers in the final round. Directed since 1965 by Monique Marcil, one of the founder members, the competition quickly became one of the most famous in the world.
Known as the ‘city of a hundred steeples’ and famous for the quality of its organs (the majority made by the firm of Casavant Frères), Montreal has maintained its reputation as the organ capital of North America. Since 1971, under the artistic direction of Raymond Daveluy, the Concert Spirituel has organized the Organ Festival of the Oratory of St Joseph, which features organists from all over the world and allows a large public to hear the magnificant Beckerath organ installed in the basilica in 1960.
The Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, also held annually each summer, was founded in 1980 by Alain Simard and André Ménard. Attendance in 1998 was assessed at over a million spectators. The festival is regarded as one of the major jazz events in the world.
During the 18th century and most of the 19th, music education in Montreal consisted of little more than basic solfège and classroom singing; only a few private teachers offered more advanced training. From 1876, however, a number of attempts were made to create a specialized music school, but most of them were short-lived. With the creation of the Dominion College of Music in 1894, music education had a more solid basis; for about 50 years it organized graded examinations, issuing degrees and diplomas in association with Bishop’s College (now Bishop’s University). In 1904 the McGill Conservatorium was founded through a gift of Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, chancellor of McGill University. In 1921 the university formed a faculty of music, associated with the conservatorium, with H.C. Perrin as dean. The department and conservatorium (now the preparatory school) continue to thrive, having had a particularly active period of growth during the decade 1965–75.
In 1905 Alphonse Lavallée Smith founded the Conservatoire National de Musique, which offered courses leading to music degrees in association with the Université de Montréal, and which continued to play an important role through the 1930s. The Ecole Normale de Musique was founded in 1926 by the Dames de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame. At first affiliated to the Université de Montréal, it was integrated into the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1976. In 1933 the nuns of Les Saints Noms de Jésus et de Marie gave their school of music, founded in 1920, the name of the Ecole Supérieure de Musique d’Outremont. Renamed the Ecole Vincent d’Indy in 1951, this school, initially affiliated to the Université de Montréal and then to the University of Sherbrooke, has been a private music college since 1978. The Conservatoire de Musique et d’Art Dramatique was created by the government of Quebec province in 1943, on the model of the Paris Conservatoire; it has branches in other principal cities of the province. In 1950 the Université de Montréal founded its own faculty of music offering courses in interpretation, composition and musicology. Following the example of the other universities of Montreal, Concordia University has offered music courses since 1974; since 1990 its music department has had a concert hall of its own (cap. 600).
At the beginning of the 20th century Montreal was very active in the field of recording. It was the headquarters of the Berliner Gramophone Company, the first recording company in Canada, and of Compo Company Ltd, founded in 1918 and the largest Canadian record-manufacturing firm of the time. This branch of the music industry took off again in and after the 1960s, when many Montreal companies were founded, including Gamma Records Ltd (1965), the Société Nouvelle d’Enregistrement (1977), Les Disques Audiogram Inc. (1982), Analekta (1987–), Atma (1989–) and Fonovox (1994–). The Montreal branch of the Canadian Music Centre, opened in 1973, plays an important role in collecting and promoting music from Quebec and other parts of the country.
EMC2 (G. Potvin)
B. Sandwell, ed.: The Musical Red Book of Montreal (Montreal, 1907)
Montreal Music Year Book (1931–2)
M. Valois: Au carrefour des souvenirs (Montreal, 1965)
W. Pelletier: Une symphonie inachevée (Montreal, 1972)
C. Goulet: Sur la scène et dans la coulisse (Quebec, 1981)
D.R. Cooper: Opera in Montreal: a Study of Performance Traditions and Repertoire, 1738–1980 (diss., U. of Toronto, 1983)
G. Potvin: Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and Toronto: les cinquante premières années (Montreal, 1984) [in Fr. and Eng.]
J. Gilmore: Swinging in Paradise: the Story of Jazz in Montreal (Montreal, 1988)
J. Gilmore: Who’s Who of Jazz in Montreal: Ragtime to 1970 (Montreal, 1989)
M. Barrière: La société canadienne-française et le théâtre lyrique à Montréal entre 1840 et 1913 (diss., Laval U., Quebec, 1989)
J.-J. Nattiez: ‘Montréal: musiques actuelles’, Circuit, i/2 (1990)
H. Paul: ‘Le Canada Musical’, Cahiers de l’ARMuQ, xiii (1991), 48–65
H. Paul: ‘L'importance des femmes dans la vie musicale montréalaise’, Les Bâtisseuses de la cité (Montreal, 1993), 221–31
J.-J. Nattiez: ‘Autoportraits: Montréal après 1967’, Circuit, viii/1 (1997)