Lois Marshall passed away some years ago, and now, just a few months ago, Maureen Forrester, too, at the age of 79. Maureen was a good friend of CJRT-FM where I was music director, and she readily donated her services, as did Andrew Davis and the Toronto Symphony, for a benefit concert for the station. Later, she joined the CJRT Orchestra for a performance of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer. At another concert in 1979—entitled The Romantic Spirit—she performed Schumann’s song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben with pianist Derek Bampton. Then with the CJRT Orchestra she gave the Toronto premiere of R. Murray Schafer’s remarkable Adieu Robert Schumann.

In a 1979 interview for CJRT-FM I asked her if she was nervous about her Carnegie Hall debut in 1956. Her answer was illuminating about both her personality and her appreciation of Canadian musical institutions:

The ‘big break’ began to take shape when Bruno Walter asked her to audition. He was about to give his last concerts in New York and needed a contralto for Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection.” His favourite contralto was Kathleen Ferrier but she had died in 1953 and he had been looking for someone like her ever since. Why did he pick Maureen?

Maureen was a great artist but never let her reputation go to her head. She went about her work with a smile and with a ready and hearty laugh. She was famous and beloved and happy in her life and work. At least this was the public persona. What few admirers knew—at least until the appearance of her autobiography in 1986—was that there was pain and suffering too. Her first child was born out of wedlock and it was a struggle to persuade the father of her child to do the honourable thing. She raised five fine children with husband Eugene Kash and they shared many happy times together. But the marriage ended in divorce, Maureen struggled with alcoholism, and then came dementia in her later years. Maureen was a successful but complex woman. The public admired the talent, the confidence, the energy and the jolly personality, but she had her demons. And her last years were sad and disheartening for those of us who admired her so much and wished her a kinder and gentler old age.

She was justly famous for her Mahler but she had a wide repertoire that encompassed a lot of music by Canadian composers. She did opera too and did it well. Highlights for the author include her powerful Countess in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades at the National Arts Centre, Madame de la Haltière in Massenet’s Cendrillon—again, at the National Arts Centre—Erda in Wagner’s Das Rheingold at the Met, or her crazy and jolly Witch in Hansel and Gretel for the CBC in 1969.

The music written for her vocal range was more often gloom and doom than comic turns, but that wasn’t Maureen’s personality. She laughed often, talked a mile a minute and really wanted to present herself to the public in a less formal way. As she put it in her autobiography:

Her career took a totally new direction when she agreed to put together a nightclub act for the Imperial Room at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. You can get some idea of what kind of repertoire she did and how she did it on a 1985 CD titled “From Kern to Sondheim” with pianist John Arpin (Fanfare/Pro Arte CDD 374).

While she could have lived anywhere in the world after she became famous, she chose to live in Toronto most of her life, and travelled frequently to some of the smallest communities in the country. And we shouldn’t forget the good work she did to encourage Canadian artists as president of Jeunesses Musicales and as chairman of the Canada Council.