Seven years ago, Alexander Neef was preparing himself for a career as a school teacher.

Today, he is the incoming general director of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto.

Transformations that rapid usually happen only on the stage, where a lucky break can propel an understudy to stardom. There are stars behind the scenes, too, and by some accounts, Neef is one of them.

The 34-year-old German opera producer entered the opera business through a side door, and went straight for head office. A one-month internship at the Salzburg Festival in 2000 while he was still a history student led to a job at a major German arts festival, and then to a plum post at the Paris Opera, where he has been head of casting since 2004.

In his brief career, Neef has worked on dozens of productions, including more than 80 at the Paris Opera. As director of casting in Paris, and earlier at the RuhrTriennale festival in Germany, he built a wide network of contacts with leading singers, conductors and stage directors.

“He is a person with the very highest level of taste and integrity,” American opera director Peter Sellars said in an endorsement solicited by the COC and exhibited on its website. “He has impeccable standards and is extremely discerning.”

On the stage of the Four Seasons Centre last week, COC president David Ferguson seemed a little star-struck as he introduced Neef as “the future of the Canadian Opera Company.” Perhaps this is what it looked like, I thought, when the Toronto Symphony Orchestra bagged the young, upwardly mobile Seiji Ozawa as its music director four decades ago.

Ozawa went on to become an international star, and perhaps a similar future awaits Neef. As of now, however, he has never run a performing-arts company, nor programmed an opera season on his own account. Until now, he has never stepped beyond the very large shadow of Gérard Mortier, the Belgian impresario who has served as Neef's mentor and boss since the day the young German showed up in Salzburg.

Is that a problem? Maybe not. Ferguson insisted that the COC search committee had no doubts about Neef's ability to lead the company, and to plot its artistic future. “He gave us a very strong impression that he's his own man,” Ferguson told me. “He definitely has his own vision.”

The process the search committee used to winnow its final list of three candidates down to one sounds a bit like an operatic variation on Survivor. They didn't just interview the contenders; they put them into situations much like those they would encounter if they actually were the company boss. Each finalist met with key staff members, had dinners with top-level supporters and, most importantly, had to present a detailed prospective season for the COC.

“Alexander's presentation was the most compelling, the most exciting, and led to the most discussion on our part,” Ferguson said. “He conveyed a very high level of awareness of the knowledge needed to program a season.”

He also showed he knew how to work a room, Ferguson said, and how to pick up subtle clues about how Canadian ways of thinking and acting differ from those of, say, Parisians or Berliners. “He has convinced us that he's a very quick study,” said Ferguson. “He's very keen to absorb all the nuances involved in running a cultural organization here.”

The COC knows all too well what can happen when you import a high-powered visionary leader who is not so sensitive to those nuances. In 1989, the company gave the general director's job to Brian Dickie, a British opera producer who had spent 25 years at the illustrious Glyndebourne Festival, including four as administrative head. In his five years at the COC, Dickie raised the company's artistic ambitions and initiated collaborations with major Canadian theatre artists, beginning with Robert Lepage's productions of Erwartung and Bluebeard's Castle. But Dickie also misread the cultural ecology and alienated supporters, errors that led to his abrupt departure five years before the end of his contract.

Aside from brief monthly trips to New York to help Mortier prepare to take charge of New York City Opera in 2009, Neef hasn't worked in North America. He's accustomed to large, heavily subsidized companies in European centres where opera is pretty much assumed to be an integral part of the national culture. The British-born Richard Bradshaw, by contrast, had spent 12 years at San Francisco Opera before he came to Canada, and another five at the COC (as chief conductor) before replacing Dickie.

The COC went shopping for leadership this time from a position of strength, with a boffo new theatre, full houses every night, high morale and plenty of moneyed friends. What it needed most, to put it bluntly, was someone who could make the company worthy of the hall.

It also needed someone who could show up for work soon, not in two or three years. Bradshaw's sudden death last summer didn't allow for a leisurely succession, even though the company's plans were already set for the next two or three seasons. Opera calendars fill at least three years in advance, and Neef would like to extend the COC's planning envelope even further.

Indeed, he said his first priorities when he arrives in October will be to start working on the 2011-12 season, and to find a music director. He also plans to analyze his new situation from every angle, to discover what works and what doesn't.

“First of all, I will watch and listen very carefully,” he said. “I will try to be there and support the productions and the artists, and try to make an impact.”

When he was in Toronto for interviews in May, he said, he also found it useful to talk with people sitting next to him in the Four Seasons Centre, who had no idea their soft-spoken neighbour might soon be running the company. He would like to have that kind of contact in the future, though “I don't know how I could do it, unless I put on a beard and a wig.”

Even though the works and artists have all been chosen for next year, there will be plenty of detail that may need the general director's attention. And Neef excels at persistent attention to detail. “He is one of the very few collaborators I have ever worked with that you can be sure that absolutely everything will get done,” said Mortier, in another endorsement solicited by the COC.

Mortier seems to have fostered that trait, to judge from Neef's response when I asked about the most important lesson he learned from his mentor. “Never stop looking for the best solution,” Neef said. “Because he will not let it go [until he has found it.]”

The best solutions in Toronto could include major works that the COC has never done, he said. “I think it's very tempting to do the company's first-ever Parsifal, or its first Die Frau ohne Schatten [by Richard Strauss]. That interests me very much, to fill these gaps in the repertoire.”

He also said he would expect to do at least one “more or less contemporary” work each season. How contemporary? “At least postwar, or written within the past 20 years.” That could include Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin, which Neef worked on in Salzburg (with Peter Sellars), and which he described as one of the best operas of recent years.

The operas of John Adams and Philip Glass (never yet performed by the COC) represent another gap Neef seemed inclined to fill, though the Canadian premiere of Adams's Nixon in China has just slipped out of reach: Vancouver Opera recently announced that it will do the opera in 2010. Commissions are also on Neef's agenda, though he said he would like first to hold discussions about what contemporary music theatre is or should be.

“I want to go to a performance and be able to understand something,” he said, outlining his own minimum requirements. “I don't have to understand everything, but I think the public should be able to come without any prior knowledge, and understand something.”

His COC will continue to offer productions in many different styles, he said, not just the postmodern sallies with which Mortier enlivened and sometimes inflamed the opera scene in Europe. There's still much pleasure and meaning to be found, Neef said, in the work of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, whose humanistic stagings are still on the boards in Europe, 20 years after his death.

“There are many ways to do opera well,” Neef said. “Some pieces are so universal, musically and theatrically, that they invite you to look for an interpretation, pieces like Don Giovanni or Tristan or whatever. But I don't see any reason to do a eurotrash production of Tosca, if you know what I mean. I'm not saying I don't like Tosca – I think it's a great opera. It's just that there are not very many ways you can stage it.”

You could say the same about running an opera company in the 21st century: Sometimes there are many ways to do it, and sometimes just a few. At the COC, the options are now in the hands of Alexander Neef.