Maureen Forrester

Origins and early life

Maureen Kathleen Stewart Forrester, born in Montreal to a Scottish cabinetmaker and his Irish-born wife, sang in church and radio choirs and left school at thirteen to work as a secretary at Bell Telephone and help support the family; her brother, home from the war, persuaded her to take singing lessons, which she paid for herself.

Work and career

She was runner-up on the CBC radio competition Opportunity Knocks in 1951, gave her first recital at the local YWCA in 1953 and made her concert debut in Beethoven's Ninth with the Montreal Symphony under Otto Klemperer. Bruno Walter, who had been a protégé of Mahler, was looking for a contralto for the Resurrection symphony, found her, and trained her in Mahler's music; she sang at his farewell concerts with the New York Philharmonic in 1957, and Mahler remained the heart of a career sung across Europe and North America.

In 1957 she married the Toronto violinist and conductor Eugene Kash, with whom she had five children, and converted to Judaism. She was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1967, chaired the Canada Council from 1983 to 1988 and entered the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1990.