Opera star Maureen Forrester dies at 79

Maureen Forrester, the big-hearted anti-diva who became Montreal’s most famous classical vocal export, died on Wednesday in Toronto at age 79.

Gina Dineen, one of Forrester’s five children, said her mother was surrounded by her family as she passed away. The great contralto had waged a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

During a prime that lasted more than 30 years, Forrester was the dark and radiant singer of choice for the music of Gustav Mahler. It was in that composer’s Symphony No. 2 that she made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1957 with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Bruno Walter, one of a few mid-century podium giants who heard Forrester as the successor to the English contralto Kathleen Ferrier.

Trained as a singer of German art songs and English oratorio, Forrester later migrated to the opera stage, vividly portraying an assortment of supporting characters she liked to characterize as "mothers, maids, witches, bitches, mediums, nuns, aunts and pants."

While her natural effervescence made Forrester irresistible in roles as light as the Queen of the Fairies in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, no one who experienced her chilling interpretations of the Old Prioress from Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmlites and Klytemnestra from Strauss Elektra will ever forget them.

It is significant that her activities at the Metropolitan Opera were limited in part because of her frustration over the static dramatic style that prevailed in the New York house in the 1970s.

Born on July 25, 1930, to a Scottish cabinetmaker father and Irish mother, Forrester hailed from an era when the east end of Montreal was home to thousands of working-class Protestant anglophones. A tomboy with a fondness for basketball, she dropped out of school and went to work. Happily, her mother kept her busy in church choirs, where her vocal gifts became apparent.

Unlike most Canadian singers of promise, Forrester studied almost entirely in her hometown, first with Sally Martin and the English tenor Frank Rowe. Her most important artistic mentors were the Dutch-born baritone Bernard Diamant and the German-born pianist John Newmark, both postwar immigrants steeped in the great European tradition.

Forrester’s potential was recognized quickly. She sang with the Montreal Elgar Choir in 1951 at the Salvation Army Citadel and made her recital debut in 1953 with Newmark, her preferred accompanist, at the YMCA. She toured Quebec and Ontario under the auspices of Jeunesses Musicales and gave a recital for the Ladies Morning Musical Club. At this point Forrester was supported quietly by the Montreal Star publisher and philanthropist J.W. McConnell.

After her discovery by the wider world in the mid-1950s, Forrester enjoyed a busy and lucrative international career. Yet she remained loyal to her country, championing works by Canadian composers, including Harry Somers, R. Murray Schafer and Alexander Brott. She also made herself available for small-town pit stops between the glamorous international engagements.

"They think, ‘She’ll never come,’" Forrester said in 1994 of a surprising appearance in an operetta in Chicoutimi. "But of course I’ll come. Those crowds are wonderful. They wait all year for you."

Forrester was in grand form as late as 1990, when she performed the Countess from Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades in a Tanglewood semi-staging under Seiji Ozawa. The RCA recording based on this production can be treated as her musical valedictory.

But Forrester did not confine herself to the big labels. In the mid-1980s Forrester made a memorable recording of Elgar’s Sea Pictures with the McGill Symphony Orchestra under Richard Hoenich. This disc, characteristically, also included Canadian music, by Donald Steven and Malcolm Forsyth.

Perhaps her most conspicuous act of service to Canada was her unpaid work as chairwoman of the Canada Council from 1983 to 1988, five of her peak potential earning years. Forrester agitated tirelessly in this role for greater support of the arts.

She also managed to attract criticism in 1992 by singing O Canada in English only at a constitutional conference in Vancouver. Forrester, who was bilingual, told The Gazette that this was a simple mistake exploited by "a little radical group that needed fire in their furnace."

The group undoubtedly included Quebecers who never forgave Forrester for marrying the violinist Eugene Kash in 1957 and raising her family in Toronto. The competing pressures of home and career proved hard to sustain and the couple separated in 1974. Kash died in 2004. In her candid 1986 memoir, Out of Character, Forrester recounted an extramarital affair that ended badly.

By the time Forrester made her belated Opéra de Montréal debut in 1994, as the comic Marquise in Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, her once-lustrous contralto had faded, as had her memory. Partly out of her refusal to disappoint people, she continued to fulfil engagements despite her waning powers.

She was able still to undertake philanthropic activities, including visits to the terminally ill at Toronto’s Casey House, an AIDS hospice.

"So many young people are dying," she told The Gazette. "That is really my interest now, going to them days or hours before the end, holding them and saying, ‘What did your mother used to sing for you?’"

"’Then they get a look in their eye. That is the most important thing in my life now. Never mind the performances.’"