Information/Write-up
Teresa Stratas’s recording of This Is Canada and its companion song The Night stands today as one of the most unusual and least-known entries in her discography, a 7-inch 45 issued in Canada on the 20th Fox label and manufactured by Quality Records, likely in early 1961. At the time, Stratas was still in the earliest phase of what would become one of the most celebrated operatic careers of the century. Born in Toronto and trained at the Royal Conservatory, she had only recently made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1959 after winning the MET National Council Auditions. Although her voice would soon be synonymous with Puccini heroines, Weill’s cabaret world, and daring modern roles, this modest soundtrack single captures a moment before that happened — a moment when she was simply a remarkably gifted young Canadian singer, newly visible on the international stage, and invited to lend her voice to a patriotic theme song for a Hollywood film.
The film in question was The Canadians, a 20th Century-Fox CinemaScope western directed by Burt Kennedy and starring Robert Ryan, John Dehner, Torin Thatcher, and Burt Metcalfe. Released in 1961, the film dramatized a fictional encounter between the North-West Mounted Police and a group of Sioux refugees led by Chief Eagle Shirt, who flee north after the U.S. cavalry attacks. Although framed as a frontier action movie, the narrative is rooted in a genuine historical moment that reflected Canada’s self-image as a more peaceful refuge during the Plains conflicts of the late 19th century. This framing gave the studio an opportunity to include a musical overture and vocal themes that underscored the country’s sweeping landscapes and the film’s sense of national character. For that task, Fox turned to Ken Darby, one of Hollywood’s most respected vocal directors and composers, whose work spanned The King and I, South Pacific, The Wizard of Oz, and countless choral arrangements throughout the studio system.
Darby composed two pieces for the film, This Is Canada and The Night, both of which bear his distinctive, widescreen harmonic language: stately, pastoral, and written for a large orchestra and chorus. Harry Simeone, another towering figure of mid-century American choral music — best known for arranging and popularizing “The Little Drummer Boy” — conducted the studio ensemble. On screen, the songs function like musical set-pieces evoking the sweep of the Canadian frontier. But for the Canadian market, Fox commissioned a stand-alone vocal version featuring Teresa Stratas, whose soaring lyric soprano brought unusual legitimacy and emotional weight to what might otherwise have been a routine movie tie-in. Her readings of both songs are poised, clear, and unmistakably operatic, revealing the beginnings of the emotional immediacy that would define her later work.
Because Fox did not issue a commercial soundtrack LP for The Canadians, this Canadian-pressed 45 became the only physical release of these two Darby-Simeone compositions. For that reason alone it is a curiosity among soundtrack collectors, but the additional presence of Stratas elevates it into the realm of historically significant Canadian recordings. Very few pop or film-related Stratas sides exist at all; she rarely crossed into commercial or non-classical studio sessions, preferring the stage, recital hall, and later her groundbreaking forays into the music of Kurt Weill, Shostakovich, and Rembetika. That makes This Is Canada arguably her earliest widely distributed commercial recording and certainly one of the most unusual in tone, genre, and purpose.
The record itself follows the standard 20th Fox format of the period, with the Canadian catalogue number F-239X and typical silver-on-blue labels pressed by Quality Records Limited. The runouts carry Fox’s mechanical etchings and the “H” suffix common to Quality-cut lacquers. The single was marketed only briefly, primarily as a promotional tie-in for the film’s Canadian theatrical campaign, and was never reissued on LP or CD. Surviving copies are scarce, likely due to limited initial distribution and the fact that, unlike Stratas’s later classical recordings, this disc sat outside the collecting interests of opera enthusiasts for decades.
What makes the single especially compelling today is how it captures Teresa Stratas at the threshold of her career, interpreting material far from the repertoire that would define her. Within a year she would be performing regularly at the Met and La Scala, and by the late 1960s she would be associated with some of the most challenging dramatic soprano roles of the era. The tender, cinematic phrasing she brings to This Is Canada — a patriotic Hollywood ballad written by a legendary choral arranger for a widescreen western about the formation of the Canadian West — stands as a snapshot of the country’s cultural imagination at the time, and an early testament to a young singer who would soon become a Canadian icon.
-Robert Williston
Teresa Stratas: vocals
Written by Ken Darby
Orchestra and chorus directed by Harry Simeone
From the 20th Century-Fox film release "The Canadians"
Produced by 20th-Fox Record Corporation
Manufactured by Quality Records Limited
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