A unique voice is stilled on earth

EUGENE KAELLIS

This past June, Canada and the world lost an outstanding performer, a stalwart Jew and an outspoken defender of Israel.

Just a few weeks before her 80th birthday, Maureen Forrester, stricken with Alzheimer’s, died in a nursing home. The youngest of four children born to a poor working-class, Irish-Protestant family in Montreal, Forrester became an internationally renown contralto, performing frequently in Europe, the United States and Canada and making many recordings.

She began singing in Montreal church choirs when she was a child. With an evident proficiency, she quickly picked up music theory. When she left school at 13 to supplement the family income by working at a series of low-paying jobs, much of her salary was taken up by fees for voice lessons.

Forrester began singing as a soprano but, when one of her teachers recognized her ability to perform in a lower register, she switched and went through her career as an alto (contralto). The middle range of an alto goes from G above middle C, an octave above and a half an octave below. It is comparable instrumentally to the violoncello and, just like for the ’cello, an essential instrument in classical music orchestras and string quartets, there is relatively little solo music.

Opera offers many roles for the lower male voices, bass or baritone, but for contraltos there are few opportunities. The saying is that they are never ingénues or brides, rather “mothers, maids, witches, bitches, mediums [as in a Mennoti opera], nuns, aunts and pants.” A “pants” (more precisely, toga) role would be the lead in Handel’s Julius Caesar. In Handel’s day, the role was sung, not by a natural alto, but by a castrato, these days replaced by a counter tenor who, by training, can achieve the voice quality formerly created by pre-pubescent surgery. Forrester did not exhaust the alto operatic opportunities, but she came close.

She was a woman of what might be called substantial build, the “big blonde” sometimes caricatured in popular entertainment as the “typical” contralto, but of two of her illustrious predecessors, Kathleen Ferrier (1912-1963) was slight and Marian Anderson (1897-1993) had a medium build.

Although there is a paucity of alto operatic roles, the two most frequently performed are Azucena in Il Trovatore and Maddelena in Rigoletto, both by Verdi. There are, however, more concert opportunities, including those offered by Brahms (e.g., his Alto Rhapsody). There is also an alto in Beethoven’s Chorale Symphony (the Ninth), in many masses and in a large repertory of lieder by Brahms, Schumann, Mahler and Strauss. Forrester was introduced to the music of Mahler early in her career by Bruno Walter, one of the world’s most distinguished conductors, also a Jew, originally Bruno Schlesinger, and a former student and friend of Mahler’s, who fled Germany to come to the United States. It was he who “discovered” Forrester and helped promote her career. They remained good friends and colleagues for years.

The music of Mahler (1860-1911), often of a profound sadness, as in Kindertotenlieder (Songs of Dead Children), appealed to Forrester and her audience. Her contralto voice gave yet more poignancy to the lyrics. The voice of a soprano, even a mezzo, might have been too “bright.” An alto can more touchingly convey some of the pervasive and penetrating darkness of the theme. Forrester also frequently performed Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth).

Mahler’s life was, in a “religious” sense, the opposite of Forrester’s. She became a Jew as a mature woman after marrying Eugene Kash, a Jewish violinist and musicologist. Mahler, on the other hand, after suffering years of professional frustration during turn-of-the-century Vienna, reluctantly became a Catholic. Wagner’s music was of utmost importance at that time in Germany and Austria. Wagner and others believed that a Jew lacked the Deutschtum (German culture) to conduct his “music drama,” something Mahler did to perfection when he became conductor of New York’s Metropolitan Opera orchestra.

After range, pitch and volume, the so-called “objective” features of the vocal art, there remains a large substratum of expression, often called “color,” highly subjective in its creation and in audience reaction, a trait, perhaps impossible to objectify, which shapes the voice and provides the emotional and spiritual shading, highly specific to the performer that generates, for the listener, the je ne sais quoi of the magic and uniqueness of a musical rendering. We may not be able to define it, but we know it when we hear it. That constituted the musical strength of Maureen Forrester.

Forrester was, by nature and, in spite of the dolorous aspect of some of the songs she performed, funny and flamboyant. She would occasionally, even in her performances, provide “hi-jinx” for her audiences, as in a 1984 San Diego performance of Hansel and Gretel. Playing the witch, she “flew” through the air attached to an overhead wire. It created quite a stir and impressed her children, who would ask her to repeat her “flight” for their friends.

She and Kash eventually had several children together. She was interested in marrying him, but he was somewhat elusive, even though she was pregnant with their first child. Ultimately, she prevailed; they married in London in 1957 and had a total of five children. On her initiative, they were divorced in 1976; Kash died in 2004.

While Kash did not insist on her conversion, he certainly favored it. Forrester became a Jew, raised her children as Jews and became a stalwart supporter of Israel, where she performed often, meeting prominent Israelis, including Golda Meir and Teddy Kolek. She went to Israel four times and became the chair of the Canadian-Israeli Cultural Foundation. She played benefit performances with Isaac Stern and Sasha Schneider at the Israel Festival so often that people started to refer to the trio as “The Stern Gang.” Forrester helped raise huge amounts of money for Israeli institutions.

She was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of Israelis for classical music. Unlike enthusiasts of other countries who, in casual meetings, would ask for an autograph or make some complimentary remarks, Israelis whom she encountered casually after her performance, while enthusiastically expressing their gratitude for her artistry, would, wouldn’t you know it, in the throes of near endemic chutzpah, offer her a few unsolicited “pointers” to “improve” her vocal renditions.

Forrester became a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1967. Aside from her singing career, she helped promote the arts in Canada as chair of the Canada Council for five years, beginning in 1983. She also personally taught and encouraged promising students. During the Cold War, she was invited to sing in the USSR and the People’s Republic of China.

She was a large woman with huge energy and generosity to match. She was, if not fearless, at least willing to take on the many problems a life in music-concertizing imposes and to overcome them: apportioning time for her family, learning new roles, touring, performing frequently in widely separated cities, working with people of “artistic temperaments” (which she, a very “down to earth person,” did not have, but could tolerate) and following a schedule that kept her almost always on the move and separated from her family.

After her death, in a CBC radio interview, one of her sons made a point of emphasizing the Jewishness of the family, extending to bar and bat mitzvahs and a traditional wedding chuppah. Apparently, it was not just an accommodation; being Jewish was important to her and her children.

Eugene Kaellis has written a novel, Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.

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