Dead-baby mystery gets opera treatment

There's the adulterous husband, the prudish and suicidal wife, the shadowy house guest, the seductress and the innocent young girl who never imagined that the ceiling of her bedroom contained a gruesome secret – to Dean Burry it all screamed, “write an opera."

The cast for Baby Kintyre , a radio opera by composer Dean Burry to be broadcast in serial over five Saturdays starting Nov. 7 on CBC Radio 2's Saturday Afternoon at the Opera , takes its inspiration from a real 1920s Toronto household where a baby was wrapped in newsprint and buried between the floorboards of an attic on Kintyre Avenue, only to be discovered more than 80 years later. (A second airing is planned on consecutive nights starting Jan. 19 on The Signal .)



The story of “Baby Kintyre," the mysterious newborn corpse found in 2007 by home renovator Bob Kinghorn as he looked for electrical wires in the second-floor ceiling of an east Toronto house, made headlines as Torontonians' imaginations ran wild over the impenetrable mystery of how and why the child was laid there.

CBC investigative reporter John Nicol chased the story until he tracked down Rita Rich, now in her 90s and living in western New York, who had lived with her father, aunt and uncle in the Kintyre house in the mid-1920s, when the baby is thought to have briefly lived. Nicol travelled with his producer, Mary Wiens, to interview Rich. Her memory for detail proved strong and she painted a remarkably vivid portrait of the household and family, bringing “classy, old Toronto to life," Wiens said. But she was as mystified as anyone by the baby.

“It's like the cast of an Agatha Christie novel," said Burry, also the librettist. “This is a very touching and moving story, but there's something very salacious and tabloid about it as well."

Burry heard Nicol's tale in a documentary on the CBC Radio program Ontario Today in September of 2007 while driving home from a family cottage. Thinking that “it's not every day that something this perfect lands in [a composer's] lap," Burry quickly e-mailed Wiens with a rough proposal: an operatic take on a traditional radio drama, in the mould of old programs like The Shadow .

Enchanted by Burry's vision, Wiens took it to David Jaeger, a music producer at the public broadcaster. Mark Steinmetz, director of music for CBC Radio, soon became intrigued by this notion of musical storytelling, which falls outside the mould of most of the broadcaster's musical commissions. So Burry wrote a pilot episode in the summer of 2008, which earned him approval to write and record the remaining four episodes.

With help from John Hess and Dairine Ni Mheadhra, artistic directors of Queen of Puddings Music Theatre, Burry assembled a Canadian cast including singers Shannon Mercer, Krisztina Szabo and Giles Tomkins, as well as 11-year-old Eileen Nash of the Canadian Children's Opera Company, who plays the young Rich, and an eight-piece chamber ensemble.

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