Trudi Le Caine helped to transform Ottawa
Trudi Le Caine helped transform Ottawa and sparked skating on canal
Mother of the arts. Doyenne of arts patrons. Grande dame of music in Ottawa.
The late Trudi Le Caine was called all those things for her tireless work promoting music, dance and art in Ottawa — not to mention the distinction of having thought up the now-iconic tradition of opening up the Rideau Canal to skaters.
“Fifty years of her life were dedicated to Ottawa,” says Peter Honeywell, executive director of the Ottawa Arts Council. “When she came here she was a little surprised — it was a bit of a cultural desert ...
“That was her mission — to contribute, to encourage. She was tenacious. She was a real organizer. She would say, ‘You just have to get those seeds planted, they will grow.’ “
Le Caine arrived in Second World War-era Ottawa when an annual list of arts events took up less than half a page in the Ottawa Citizen.
She went on to mentor countless young artists in every field and boost a host of arts organizations: the National Youth Orchestra, the National Arts Centre and its orchestra, Opera Lyra Ottawa, modern dance troupe Le Groupe de la Place Royale and contemporary music society Espace Musique.
Born Gertrude Janowski, she fled Germany at 22 after Adolf Hitler’s election in 1933, having been beaten on the street while working with the liberal opposition and learning there was a warrant for her arrest.
She, her mother and her stepfather, musician and critic Arnold Walter, fled to Spain, where civil war soon raged.
Then it was Paris, where Le Caine studied at the Sorbonne and qualified as a teacher before France was invaded by the Germans in 1940.
Finally, she landed in Toronto, where her stepfather would go on to become a renowned musicologist and educator, and came to Ottawa in 1942 after getting a job censoring the letters of Germans being held in Canadian prisoner-of-war camps.
Le Caine would later call it “a nice little village at the time” — even as she recalled locals decrying the influx of so many “foreigners.” And there were only three decent restaurants.
Her first thought was that Ottawa was “a lovely place.” Her second, that it was “awfully provincial” because there was “practically no music!”
She taught French at Broadview Public School, an experience she would later say contained her proudest moments because she was able to reach still-impressionable children with her love of the arts.
She found her passion in 1946, when Lyla Rasminsky, wife of the Bank of Canada governor and the woman she’d later call her inspiration, invited her to become a patron of a series of children’s concerts.
Le Caine became a tireless fundraiser, organized concerts, held art shows in her home, was an early supporter of the creation of the National Arts Centre, and was a longtime member of the board of what became known as the Friends of the National Arts Centre Orchestra.
In middle age, she met and married Hugh Le Caine, a National Research Council physicist and electronic music pioneer who invented an early synthesizer. Hugh Le Caine was shy — so shy he could only profess his love with armloads of flowers — but the marriage was “idyllic,” according to friend and Ottawa Citizen arts critic Audrey Ashley.
Le Caine was devastated when Hugh was injured in a 1976 motorcycle crash, lingering in a coma for months before his death. She visited every day — although medical staff tried to dissuade her — feeling that somehow he would know she was there.
“It was typical of Trudi’s devotion and her tenacity,” Ashley wrote.
Le Caine went on to launch Espace Musique, Ottawa’s contemporary music society, and was “a midwife” of Opera Lyra, which for 31 years produced professional opera in the capital.
Honeywell recalls meeting her in the late 1980s, when he’d just been appointed to the board of the Ontario Arts Council and she invited him to come sit in the garden of her modest east-end house cum salon. She was small, with a classic braid curled in a bun, and both wise and passionate.
“She absolutely felt that the arts were something that should not be taken for granted, that needed to be nurtured and helped everyone live a full life,” he says. “She lived that philosophy and her home was packed with art and books and the mementoes of an extraordinary life.”
It wasn’t just the classics that Le Caine loved; she went to every opera but also nurtured experimental electronic music and contemporary dance.
“She loved that pushing of the boundaries,” Honeywell says.
Without her, the Ottawa arts scene “probably would have been set back by a number of years.
“She was a pioneer and got people thinking and talking and pushed every button she could. She could pick up the phone and talk to (Liberal cabinet minister) Mitchell Sharp,” Honeywell says.
“She had the ability to bring people together and make something happen and she was so respectful of people,” Honeywell adds. Even when things did not go in the direction she wanted, “she never burned bridges. She got up the next day with a smile on her face.
“There were a lot of people she inspired — she certainly inspired me.”
When Valerie Knowles was looking for subjects for her book Capital Lives, it wasn’t just Le Caine’s role as a “one-woman Canada Council” that caught her eye.
Le Caine was credited with broaching the idea of skating on the Rideau Canal. She herself couldn’t skate, but she fell in love with Rockefeller Center’s skating rink in the middle of New York City. She pitched the idea of a small rink next to the NAC, first to unconvinced city officials, then to Douglas Fullerton, a friend who chaired the National Capital Commission.
Fullerton ran with the idea, sending a crew to shovel off a fivekilometre stretch in January 1971.
“The rest is history,” Knowles says with a laugh. “I knew I wanted to profile somebody who’d played a
major role in the arts in the Ottawa community. Her name just leapt off the page because she was so active. She was indefatigable and a woman of iron determination . ...
“You need people like this in the world to make a city.”
Le Caine, active and curious until the very end, died at home in September 1999.
A NACO quartet performed at the beginning of her funeral. Between speakers were performances by the Opera Lyra Ottawa Chorus singing In Paradisim and In Remembrance. La Groupe Dance Lab performed the modern dance Epitaphe.
Two years before her death, Le Caine had summed up her legacy.
“I’m a strong believer in sowing seeds,” she said. “Some seeds grow, and some don’t, but I think this is what you must do.”