Art & Creativity Quote by Maureen Forrester

There is a quiet radicalism in Forrester imagining her legacy not as a singular triumph, but as a body of work done in collaboration. In a classical culture that loves its divas and lone geniuses, she frames remembrance as something earned through repetition, craft, and partnership: “a great deal of Mahler” with “a great many phenomenal conductors.” The brag is there, but it’s softened into gratitude and scale. She’s not claiming ownership of Mahler; she’s claiming a life spent inside him.

The subtext is also about what Mahler represents in the 20th-century canon: music that became a proving ground for stamina, emotional range, and interpretive intelligence. For a contralto like Forrester, Mahler isn’t just repertory; it’s a terrain where the voice has to sound both human and monumental, intimate and apocalyptic. Saying she sang “a great deal” of it hints at endurance and seriousness without slipping into self-mythology.

The line “once I am gone” carries a performer’s realism about how fame decays. Recordings survive, names blur, and what’s left is often a shorthand: your “thing.” Forrester accepts that compression and tries to guide it toward what mattered to her, which is telling. She doesn’t cite roles, prizes, or scandals; she cites a composer whose emotional world is famously oversized, then calls it “very spiritual.” Not pious, not polite: spiritual as in searching, destabilizing, and oddly consoling. It’s a musician’s way of saying the work outlasts the worker, and she’s at peace being part of that relay.