Cornelis Opthof: with a still-active career spanning half a century, this Dutch-born baritone knows a few things about the artistry of the dedicated professional.

HE MAY BE A BIG GUY, BUT THE ONLY FIERCE thing about Cornelis Opthof is his eyebrows. Bushy, bristling, prominent, they have a potentially intimidating impact that is thankfully undercut by eyes so lightly blue they are almost transparent, and a genial, ruddy, healthy face that would somehow spell "Dutch heritage" even if you didn't know it. He is 75 years old, 6 foot 1 inch tall, in great physical shape (though he will draw your attention to the "little tummy" that has recently made an appearance) and preparing, as we meet one hot, sunny August afternoon at his home on the shores of Lake Simcoe, for the opening of his 46th season with the Canadian Opera Company. He will sing the Doctor in Verdi's Macbeth. It is a small role. He has sung it before. But I can't help but notice, as he tours me through the small bunkie beside his house, that the score is open on a dresser, and that it sits beside a tape recorder. He still sings every day. He sings through a complete opera every day. Perhaps there is something fierce about Opthof besides his eyebrows. In his quiet, almost old-fashioned way, he is fierce about singing, about professionalism, about an enduring love of opera that has little to do with big roles, big names or opera's meretricious glamour--and this from a man who has sung Scarpia, who has sung Rigoletto, who has sung with Sutherland, who has sung with Pavarotti (who has even wrestled with the man--and lost--on the beaches of Australia), who has sung at the Met, other major American houses and in Europe. In a curious way, he is fierce about, well ... about being modest.

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Cornelis Opthof was born February 10, 1930 in Rotterdam, the youngest of four children. His father was a plasterer, his mother a homemaker. It was not a musical family in any formal sense, though he calls it "a family of voices--they loved opera and knew the tunes even if they didn't know the words, and at family gatherings when they got full of beer and gin, they'd go for it." He was an athletic boy, good at track and field. He was interested in studying architecture. The war changed everything.

He was 10 when it started. He remembers it as a time of hunger ("I would try to scrounge food for our family from local farmers"), of terror ("Most of my buddies were Jewish guys and they just vanished and I never saw them again"), of loss (the family home was destroyed, his brothers taken to Germany as slave labor). There are even memories that still bring a smile--how the family canary survived after they fled their bombed-out, burning home. Water from fire hoses had filled the bottom of its cage, giving it something to drink, and making the dropped seed sprout into something it could eat. They heard the canary singing as they mounted the stairs weeks later to see what they could salvage from the ruins of their home.

Horrific as it was, the war, in a classic way, eased his entry into Canada. His sister married a soldier from the Canadian forces, moved to Trenton, Ontario, raved about her new country to her younger brother, and, in 1949, when he was 19, he emigrated--though about the only thing Canada had meant till then, he says, was Indians. A strong, strapping lad ("We want guys like you in Canada," he remembers the immigration doctor telling him), he soon took a job as a steeplejack ("Dangerous, but good pay"), learned English with relative ease and joined a glee club in Trenton. He did not imagine a singing career, but his sister thought he had a good voice and pushed him to take lessons. He found a teacher, Catharina Hendrikse, and stayed with her for seven years. She was, he says, very much an old-fashioned teacher who believed in slowly building a technique that would last a lifetime. "She wouldn't even let me sing an aria till after three years of lessons. That's the way you were taught in the old days--endless scales that drove you crazy, but it would get your sound even across your whole range."

He scraped together a living in those years by working in hardware, repairing appliances, buying and selling things, getting a truck and hiring students to work for him. "I'm kind of crafty," he says. "I never say I'm a good singer, but I will say I'm a good handyman."

He had become a good enough singer, though, to win a scholarship to the Royal Conservatory in 1957, and, just a few years later, a CBC Talent Festival (by then he had married Natalie Landyga, a violinist and fellow student, and he says part of the prize money bought the couple a baby carriage). What we now call the Canadian Opera Company was just a baby at the time, too. The singer and the company would mature together.

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He first appeared on stage in 1957, though only as an extra in a production of Die Fledermaus. The following year he was in the chorus. He came to the attention of General Director Herman Geiger-Torel during a summer opera school (his $50 tuition paid for by a grant from the Women's Committee). "He recognized I had something to give," he remembers. "I knew lots of arias by that time, and I got the other students together for duets and quartets. I could tell Torel had his eye on me." Though he wouldn't make his mainstage debut, as the Alcalde in La forza del destino, until 1959, Opthof became a stalwart with the COC touring company from 1957 till 1964, a period he recalls today as demanding, exhausting--and frequently very funny. They covered much of the country, most often by bus, and would find themselves performing in small towns in northern Ontario or in the Maritimes or out west. "They were big, tiresome tours, sometimes two months long. You'd be so scraggy and tired, and after a show you'd have to pack the costumes and make-up and sets, and often there'd be a reception with the locals and you'd be up late but still have to get up at 7 a.m. to get back on the bus next morning. I remember in Red Deer once, a piano leg gave way during a performance of [Rossini's] Barber and the whole piano fell sideways, but our pianist just kept playing." In Kenora, he and fellow baritone Victor Braun looked so scruffy (and, Opthof adds, Braun was so lippy) that the police charged them with vagrancy--and released them only after a call to the tour manager verified that they were indeed opera singers, a fact they had tried unsuccessfully to convey to very skeptical Kenora police.

I am hearing these stories in his shaded back yard, the clear waters of Lake Simcoe soughing gently just a few feet away. He is much moved by the natural world. He, his wife and their three children (none involved in music) had lived in a large, three-storey house on Walmer Road in Toronto since 1952, and he and Natalie are now savoring a life where the air is clean and where, he says, "I see rabbits and skunks and frogs. Where I can fish and swim. In the morning, we get up and see the sun rise over that island, a beautiful red ball, and we have our coffee and toast and the ducks and geese come swimming by." At one point, while we're talking, he tries to get a wasp to land on him. "You can get them to recognize you," he tells me, "and then they won't sting."

The scene seems so very much the picture of sylvan retirement that I can't help but ask whether he ever intends to stop singing. "Only," he says, "if they stop giving me work. I still get a kick out of it. It gives me such a lift. I love fishing, but stepping on stage and having 3,000 people staring at you...." It's an experience he has often enjoyed. He had a vocal range that extended easily to a high A, was eager to work (he had a family to support), mastered a convincing and imposing stage presence and took most any singing role he was offered. Besides his COC mainstage work and the early years of touring, he was getting work on television and at the Stratford Festival--his work there under Richard Bonynge in 1964, as the Count in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, leading to an Australian tour the next year with Joan Sutherland. "I remember her as such a down-to-earth, gentle soul," he says, "sitting around during rehearsals and embroidering cushions. But I've seen the steel underneath, too. Some society lady once invited her to a reception, but insisted that only Sutherland and the other principals could attend, and Sutherland told her, 'If my whole cast can't come, none of us will come.'" She got her way.

Pavarotti he remembers as "strong as a bull. I wrestled with him so many times on the Australian beaches. I'm no weakling, but he could throw me around like a sack of potatoes." And that story leads to his remembering a production of Beatrice di Tenda, with him, Sutherland and Pavarotti--"They don't come better than that."

There are many stories, of course. Though the man has sung all over the world, his singing career is practically congruent with the history of professional opera production in this country--and it's a history he wants to continue to be part of. It seems likely. As he says, "I've got good genes. I watch myself and work out regularly. I'm not much of a drinker. I'm happy to be part of the COC." If the Opthof family canary was any indication, he'll assuredly be part of the company for years to come. I asked him what happened to it after the family found it still alive in their bombed house in Rotterdam. "Oh," he said, "that bird lived and sang for another 15 years."