ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the intersection of government policy and opera creation in the first 100 years of Confederation. It proposes musical citizenship from within an operatic work, to merge the politics of citizenship with the representative potential of music, and to consider music as an embodiment of contemporary perspectives on citizenship and tolerance of cultural difference. The basis of the chapter is the consideration in six operas across the first hundred years of Canadian history of the interplay of contemporary social and political issues of citizenship and of semiotic principles in textual and musical representation or signification. It reveals similarly constructed musical identities, in which an emphasis on cultural assimilation gives way to integration and, ultimately, to a form of parallelism and individuation. The medium of opera, as a complex cultural object within the postcolonial narratives of history, becomes a vehicle for both overt and covert expressions of identity and citizenship.