Creativity Quote by Maureen Forrester

There is something slyly operatic about wanting 20 grandchildren: it takes a perfectly ordinary brag and blows it up to stage size. Maureen Forrester, a contralto built for Mahler and Handel, understood scale as an aesthetic. This line plays like a throwaway, but it’s a miniature manifesto about abundance - of family, of time, of legacy - delivered with the kind of deadpan confidence performers learn when they’ve spent decades holding an audience.

The specific intent is social and disarming. She isn’t itemizing achievements; she’s redirecting the spotlight away from career metrics and toward the private world that survives applause. Coming from a musician whose public life was defined by disciplined scarcity (practice hours, touring schedules, the narrow margins of the voice), the wish for “20” is deliberately excessive. It telegraphs humor, yes, but also appetite: a refusal to shrink into tasteful, manageable expectations of aging.

The subtext carries a quiet pushback against how we measure women’s lives in the arts. Late-life praise often arrives as a eulogy in advance - look at what she did, wasn’t that enough? Forrester answers with a number so unreasonably joyful it short-circuits that script. It’s not sentimentality; it’s a wager on continuity. Grandchildren are a living audience you don’t have to tour for.

Context matters: Forrester came of age when female performers were expected to be both glamorous and self-effacing, present everywhere and rooted nowhere. “Hoping for 20” is her way of claiming rootedness with a wink - turning the grand finale into an encore.