ackstage at Toronto’s opera house, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, I wait for my cue. The maestro is in the pit, taking applause. The stage manager gives him one minute, ten seconds to be adored by the audience, but not a moment more: she flashes a light, and the Vorspiel begins with swooning strings. The curtain rises. I’m tucked behind the set holding a broom, my prop. The set is made to look like the backstage of a travelling opera company: fake dressing rooms, a steel staircase, a carefully choreographed mess of suitcases, wardrobes, chairs, trunks, and footlockers, and a gaggle of sopranos and tenors running about. I am an extra, or what opera calls a “supernumerary,” walking, breathing stagecraft meant to fill out the production, to give it some human character. My job is to sweep the floor in the first act of Ariadne auf Naxos, by Richard Strauss, and to look as if I know what I’m doing. I cannot sing, I cannot act. I am playing a stagehand. Watching a TV monitor behind the set, I can see the maestro. Behind him is the first row of the audience. A man in a cream suit and lavender tie has on two pairs of glasses, one on his nose, one on his head. Next to him, another man twists the cap of a water bottle. They look grim, waiting to be amazed. Behind them are over 2,000 opera fans, some of whom paid up to $300 to see a hundred-year-old masterpiece of German opera. Here’s what I know about opera: nothing. Molière says, of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive. When I’ve listened to opera, this is what I’ve heard: take a soprano, train her for years in technique. Now slam her hand in a car door. The result is opera.

A tenor bellows his line, “Mein Herr Haushofmeister!” and the assistant stage manager points at me. I enter stage left, pushing the broom past a ladder, and pretend to be grumpy that it’s in my way. This is called “business,” or acting. Both of my grandmothers worked as maids when they immigrated to Canada from Finland. I feel I know something deeply genetic about sweeping floors. I have strong janitorial roots. Thinking this distracts me from the facts of my situation, but the facts pile in: I have never been onstage before; I don’t understand German, neither sung nor spoken; my opera education comes from the Bugs Bunny cartoons; my heart is beating like a beached minnow; my mouth is dry, as if I’ve eaten a horse blanket. Safely, I exit stage right and pass my broom to the real stagehands, who sit by the props table, whispering. My first entrance lasted sixteen seconds. I have two more before the end of act one.

feel about grand opera the way I feel about wine. I am sure there are differences between red and white, and I am told that even within the definition of red there are variations available to those with taste. To me, it’s all of a kind. Same with opera: I applaud the real fans, the fans with two pairs of glasses, who find entry into a world of high human emotion — love and death, sex and betrayal, sex and death, and love and betrayal.

I’m glad opera exists for those who treat it like a liturgy: it speaks to a culture not entirely caught in the blinding lights of commerce and cutthroat self-advancement, a culture that values beauty and truth. But I have next to no musical training, save two years of junior high school band in which I played the tuba, a poor lens through which to contemplate the complexities of music. At that level, the tuba is not much more difficult to play than holding a blade of grass between your thumbs and making raspberry noises. I can’t read music. It’s ants on a page.

My friend Mr. Pete (even his mother calls him Mr. Pete) came from what, to me, is another world: his Irish father held season tickets to the Canadian Opera Company, where Mr. Pete’s aunt, Patricia Crum, was a lead soprano. On road trips, Mr. Pete’s father would roll up the windows and play Italian opera from a cassette and light a cigar, and his wife and sons would choke on the noise and the smoke. While it’s true Mr. Pete still has a Pavlovian gag response to Verdi, he grew to love opera, especially twentieth-century composers, the twelve-tone masters like Schoenberg. From there he found jazz, then complicated, atonal pop music like Captain Beefheart.

Meanwhile, the first music I ever bought was Captain and Tennille’s “Muskrat Love,” which seemed complicated enough. At home, my parents played Jim Croce and Chicago. I won’t blame them for my lack of exposure to the fine arts: we can’t all have rich, textured childhoods trapped in smoke-filled cars with Italian opera. Instead, I blame my grandparents, or rather the genetic line on which they converged. Three of the four were Finnish immigrants. It’s accepted as fact that Finns can be emotionally unavailable, remote from the blustery romantic ideas expressed in music and art, favouring the thrum of Sibelius, or union fight songs learned in lumber camps. The Finn wears his heart not on his sleeve, but in a Tupperware container in the refrigerator, the better to bear the trials of a working life. Tell him a joke, and if he deems it funny, having appraised it on all sides for joke-worthiness, he will not laugh but will say, “That’s funny.” This may go some way to explaining why I favour irony and a kind of distant, smartass cynicism over open sincerity. Growing up on ironic smartass television had a lot to do with it, too, but in quiet times I wonder about my own wiring, whether I’m too cold to know the beauty of an aria.

But then there’s the fourth grandparent. I never knew him. He died of consumption, that tragic, operatic disease so common to immigrants, when my mother was just a girl. He was Italian — the culture of romance and heart.

I can live a happy enough life, I figure, never knowing the difference between a bel canto and a Bell Calling Card: the idea of two people singing at each other strikes me as counterintuitive, unless those two people are Sonny and Cher. But now that I’m in my late forties, I wonder about the current of hot Latin running through the depths of the ironic, cranky, slow-moving cool Finnish river, and whether I’m too late to find a connection to great art, or if what I have to do is swim deeper. The truth is, there is a finite number of things that will happen to me before I’m dead. Perhaps I shouldn’t wait to accidentally trip over the sublime but instead seek it out. So my inner Italian sent me to the COC. I sought access, to see how opera is made and if I, without training, could learn to love it, or tolerate it, or at least sit through it — boot camp for the artistically stunted.

I met the company brass in the office of the general director, Alexander Neef, at the old brick fruit warehouse on Front Street East that serves as the COC’s administrative headquarters and rehearsal space. In an act of goodwill (and with the knowledge that I would be writing about my experience), we shook hands: I would be welcome at rehearsals, coaching sessions, and backstage of the big spring productions. Later, when I sat down with the company’s head of communications, I upped my bet: most operas use extras, spear carriers or angry peasants with pitchforks, human props. The collective agreement between the company and its performers allows for civilians in small roles, supernumeraries (or just “supers”) who bring no acting or singing skill, only an ability to fit available costumery. Was there room for an extra extra in one of the spring shows?

“Can you dance?” she asked. I cannot. Too bad; they needed six dancers in the spring production of Rossini’s Cinderella (La Cenerentola) to play rats. But they did need four supers in Ariadne auf Naxos, a modern production of the opera-within-an-opera by Australian director Neil Armfield. I promised, as per the collective agreement, that I had no special skills or training of any kind, and that no matter the outcome of my cockeyed trip into opera I wouldn’t let them down onstage.

irector Neil Armfield premiered this production in Wales. It has done a small circuit, including Boston and now Toronto. Opera companies are always looking for artistically sound ways to save money, and they’ve found economies of scale in co-productions. Opera has become a global game: by teaming up with other companies, they can share resources, and they don’t have to build sets or acquire props from scratch. Ariadne in effect came here in a box, ready for unpacking and staging. Armfield, fifty-six, is the former artistic director of Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney, Australia, a proponent of “poor theatre” that favours simple human interaction over fancy sets and technical flummery. He has just wrapped an off-Broadway show with Geoffrey Rush, Gogol’s The Diary of a Madman. At the first meeting of cast and crew, in a high-ceilinged rehearsal hall, he briefs us on the opera.

He wears a grey Brooklyn hoodie, heavy square glasses, and a puckered smile that hints at mischief.

“It’s taken me a long time to fall in love with Ariadne auf Naxos,” he tells us, passing out photographs of the Welsh production. He had seen it only once before, and no one he talked to afterward could remember what it was about. “It was dull — horrible, really,” he says. Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, were keen to present an elaborate inside joke, a tribute to serious opera with a comic twist. They first performed it in 1912, reworked it in 1916. The first act opens backstage of the actual opera to follow in act two. A star soprano, a tenor, three women who will play Wagnerian nymphs, a beleaguered composer, are all told by the Major-Domo, right hand to the Richest Man in Vienna, that they will have to share the stage with a travelling commedia dell’arte troupe. This is to save time and up the entertainment value at the Richest Man’s dinner party. The performers go bananas: how dare they cheapen serious opera with a bunch of street performers?

In act two, the serious opera begins: Ariadne (played by the diva soprano we met in act one) has been dumped by her lover, Theseus, on a desert island. Heartbroken, she wants to die. The commedia troupe tries to cheer her up. She’s deaf to their games. Then Bacchus, god of wine, arrives and sweeps her off her feet in an eighteen-minute duet in which he and Ariadne circle each other, sing, and finally embrace. Love conquers death.

Armfield’s idea is to scrap the chandeliers-and-powdered-wig convention of the original production and make it modern. The comedians arrive dressed as if for a beach party, carrying pizza and beer. One of the nymphs has a cellphone, with which she constantly texts her boyfriend. Stagehands sweep the floor, move gear, climb ladders, and look busy. In Wales, Armfield used real stagehands, but in Toronto this would be cost prohibitive: the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the union that represents real stagehands, has a collective agreement that allows for crew members to appear onstage in exchange for an extra hour’s wage per hand. Supers are paid $12 a rehearsal, $13 a performance, a comparative bargain.