Dean Burry.

At the age of 36, Dean Burry has already written so many operas that it's a challenge to account for them all.

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"Let me just do a quick tally," he says over breakfast in a Toronto cafe. "There's Unto the Earth: Vignettes of a War. Then there's The Brothers Grimm, The Hobbit, Isis and the Seven Scorpions and The Vinland Traveler. As well, I have two pieces in production: Children of the Moon and Pandora's Locker. So I guess that's seven." That's not counting an equal number of assorted music-theatre works that don't, in his opinion, qualify as operas.

The Newfoundland native doesn't exclusively write theatrical works, but he proudly asserts that it's his "grand passion" to write for the stage. And he doesn't just write the music: he's also his own librettist. "A lot of composers," he says, "come from an orchestral or chamber-music background. But I came from the theatre. I've been writing my own scripts since I was putting on puppet plays in Grade Four."

For more than a decade, Burry has lived in Toronto, with his violinist wife and now their baby daughter. His move to the big city in 1994--initially, to study music at the University of Toronto--proved the stepping-stone he needed to launch his compositional career. In 1997, he infiltrated the Canadian Opera Company as a box-office clerk, and within a few years was running the COC's After-School Opera Program for kids, which he still does.

In 2001, the COC commissioned him to write The Brothers Grimm, a children's opera that the company toured throughout Ontario. The piece was a hit: it's been staged more than 300 times, by opera companies in Ottawa, Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Edmonton.

Burry wrote The Hobbit, based on the Tolkien novel, for the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus, in 2004. This time the kids weren't just in the audience, they were also on stage, comprising most of the performers. Following its Toronto premiere, the CCOC took it on an East Coast tour. This spring, the work received its U.S. premiere when Sarasota Opera staged it. Burry made the trip to Florida, and came back impressed with what he saw. "It looked like a mainstage production. The full resources of the company were put into producing the show."

Burry doesn't want to be "pigeonholed" as a composer of children's operas. But it's a genre he takes very seriously. "When I'm writing music for young people, I'm not writing down to them at all: I don't write 'la-dee-da, deedily-deedily-dee' stuff. If you give them an honest work that takes to heart their sensibilities, they're into it. I've never had such an artistically satisfying experience as sitting in the back of a high-school gymnasium watching 300 kids as engrossed in an opera as they would be in a TV show or a video game."

So what's Burry doing these days? It's always a fairly safe bet to say that he's writing another opera. In fact, he's working on six: a serialized radio-opera for the CBC; works for theatre companies in Newfoundland and New Brunswick; new children's operas for the COC and Opera Lyra Ottawa; and a commission from Toronto Masque Theatre. "There's a huge trunk of stories in my head waiting for the right opportunities," he says.