Alden-Style Dutchman Returns to Home Port: Wayne Gooding welcomes the revival of a classic to launch the Canadian Opera Company’s first full post-pandemic season

Albeit ambitiously opening Toronto’s new opera house in 2006 with the first Canadian-produced Ring cycle, the Canadian Opera Company has had a spotty relationship with Wagner over its more than seventy-year history. The new house has seen Der fliegende Holländer, a Tristan and revivals of Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, but the company’s single shots at Lohengrin and Die Meistersinger were almost forty years ago, and it has never staged Tannhäuser or Parsifal. The Holländer, though, is one of the oldest and most-travelled productions still in the company’s repertoire.