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“I absolutely thought it was the most boring thing I’d ever heard.”
That's how Emma Pennell recounts their first experiences with opera, huddled over a battery-powered radio in their family’s northern Ontario home that had no running water, electricity or internet. Fast forward to the present day, and they are one of the fastest-rising stars in Canada, earning a place in the prestigious Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio and receiving the 2025 RBC Emerging Artist Award at the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards at the National Arts Centre.
Despite their initial dislike for the genre, Pennell had been singing since they were a small child, performing alongside their family members in a country-western ensemble comprised of their grandparents, uncle, and siblings. They recount the small fairs and square dances they would perform at and the bond that was formed between the performer and the audience.
“When you’re from a small area and we’re putting on the shows for people... you know them. You know their name and they’re so much appreciative of what you’re bringing to them,” Pennell explains. “It really helped me as an artist to remember that the people in your audience are your community.”
Pennell carries that idea of artist-audience connection into a genre that, to them, feels rather separated from that ideal. The lack of connection to audience means that the operatic ideal – the beautiful diva on the stage with a bouquet in one hand blowing kisses with the other – is the image that fills in the gap of an authentic relationship. The result, in Pennell’s case, is people judging their outward appearance and not their artistry, especially online.
“When I bring myself – when I bring my culture and my body and my spirit into those spaces,” Pennell says, “people don’t know how to respond to it. The way that I am is because of colonization, you know? And people don’t want to see it. But when I’m on the stage in front of them and I can make sound like that and I can make art like that, they can’t look away.”
When people see Pennell perform, they interact with their art and their desire to create change through their art. The words “land back” tattooed on their knuckles appear simultaneously with performances of Puccini, creating a one-of-a-kind force that will cause ripples in Canada’s classical music scene as it continues to reckon with reconciliation.
“I had an elder tell me when I was doing my degree in Indigenous studies at Western that... when you know that something is wrong and needs to be righted, your spirit will tell you what to do,” says Pennell. “And what your responsibility is as an Indigenous person is to not ignore that feeling. There’s been a lot of challenges in navigating this very colonial world of classical music where I get that feeling and I know I can’t ignore it because it will not go away, and I have to say something. That's my responsibility. I’m going to keep not ignoring that voice.”