Celebrated Canadian opera star Maureen Forrester has died.
With family at her bedside, the 79-year-old quietly slipped away, said her daughter Gina Dineen on Wednesday night.
Forrester was 20th-century Canada’s incarnation of the prototypical 19th-century diva. She sang incomparably, gave generously of her rare musical gifts and her worldly goods, and lived life “in the large.”
She was born in 1930 in a French-speaking neighbourhood of Montreal to musical working-class parents of Scots-Irish descent. She was the youngest of four children. She left high school at 13 and took a job as a secretary to finance her singing lessons, assisted by funds from the Montreal Social Club. Her voice teachers were Sally Martin, English tenor Frank Rowe, and finally, at age 20, her most important teacher, the Dutch baritone Bernard Diamant, who was teaching at Montreal’s École Vincent d’Indy and McGill University. She began her long association with the noted German-born Montreal pianist-accompanist-coach John Newmark in 1953, when she was 23, and with Newmark she toured the world.
In 1957, she married the Toronto violinist Eugene Kash. Their five children grew to adulthood in the shadow and brightness of their mother’s ever-burgeoning fame.
Forrester established her unique persona early. On one hand she took pleasure in washing her own floors. On the other, she loved to live and laugh and spend money on beautiful things. In the wake of her marriage, which ended in 1974, she had some grandes affaires. Her singing career was major from the outset, stretching across five continents. In her prime she sang as many as 120 concerts a year.
She was a big woman, magnificent on the platform (always gorgeously gowned and coiffed) and charismatic on the operatic stage. She was always supremely present for her audience; your eye couldn’t leave her and, when she sang, neither could your ear. Her voice, arguably an opulent and capacious mezzo-soprano, officially a contralto, was famous in Mahler, ideal in Brahms and Dvorak, supple and agile in Bach and Handel, intimate in the most delicate lied and mélodie, simple or rude or funny in folksong or operetta.
Her embodiment of earth-mother, reigning queen and good sport made her the shining model of what Canadians want a diva to be. And her some 30 honorary degrees from Canadian universities (she was even chancellor Wilfrid Laurier University from 1986 to 1990) and her many other honours attested to her unique and powerful numen for Canadians. Her service from 1983 to 1988 as chair of the Canada Council left no doubt that her wisdom in the arts was valued. Her personal advocacy of Canadian music went well beyond lip service: she premiered and championed major vocal pieces by a wide range of Canadian composers.
An authentic celebrity, she touched the Canadian nerve as no other singer of her time had done.
Conductor Mario Bernardi turned on the car radio one day when he was out shopping: “I heard music of Mahler, so utterly idiomatic and magical I pulled over, parked, and listened raptly to the end. It was Maureen. The conductor was Bruno Walter. Simply fabulous. Later on, she sang in my own first Song of the Earth, and for me her input was perfection.”
Bernardi worked often with Forrester. With her and his National Arts Centre Orchestra he premiered and recorded major vocal works of Somers (Five Songs for Dark Voice, in 1970) and Schafer (Adieu Robert Schumann, in 1978). He also engaged her for many of his operatic productions. “Hermann Geiger-Torel told me I was mad to ask Maureen to sing opera,” Bernardi said, “insisting she was a recitalist and concert singer with no stage skills. But I hired her to sing the Witch in Norman Campbell’s CBC-TV production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel in 1970, and she had a ball. I asked her to sing Marcellina in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, tempting her with the aria Mozart wrote for a better-then-average Marcellina, and she astonished the doubters. She went on to many more important operatic roles. For me, at the National Arts Centre, she was marvelous, musically and dramatically, as the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades [1976 and 1979 at Festival Ottawa] and as the Stepmother in Massenet’s Cendrillon [1979 and 1983]. Her instincts were unfailing and on top of that, she knew how to work.”
