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“Having music in school was a huge part of my gifts being discovered.” Photo : © Paul Elledge / DG
Measha Brueggergosman is singing into the telephone: “Je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont! Je marche, tu marches, il marche, nous marchons, vous marchez, ils marchent!” It’s safe to say that French class never sounded so good.
Relaxing at her home in Toronto, the celebrated soprano burst into song in the midst of a reminiscence about her youth in Fredericton, N.B. It was there that a teacher at Park St. Elementary School first recognized the power of Brueggergosman’s bright, vibrant voice—an instrument that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, is capable of making music “sound as soulful and rapturous as possible.”
“I am a product of arts education, of music in schools,” she says. “I can still remember the names of every French immersion teacher I had in elementary school. Those formative years, although they were a nightmare for me socially, were very good for me linguistically and musically.”
At 31, Brueggergosman is a rare bird: A classical music sensation with crossover appeal. Over the past 10 years she has performed with orchestras in Berlin, Boston, Montreal, New York City, San Francisco and Toronto, including the famed Stuttgart Philharmoniker, and has given solo recitals at Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall and the Kennedy Center. In addition, her 2007 CD Surprise (her debut on the premier classical label Deutsche Grammophon) won a Juno Award for classical album of the year (vocal or choral performance).
Her big voice and outsized personality has also helped her stretch out into the realm of pop culture, with appearances on including MuchMusic’s Video on Trial and The Surreal Gourmet. She even has a Facebook fan club and is the rare diva with a MySpace page.
She says she owes every ounce of her fame to the educators and institutions that valued arts education while she was growing up. "Having music in school was a huge part of my gifts being discovered. It was a combination of that and my being part of a very musical community—having band in my junior high school, having musical productions in my high school, having the Fredericton Music Festival happening. The whole community rallied around the arts. That was a deep part of my gravitation towards classical music, certainly."
Born and raised in Fredericton, Measha Ann Gosman began singing in her church and school choirs. She studied voice and piano, and performed at local weddings, bar mitzvahs and funerals. Her parents, who are reverent Christians, forbade any secular music in the house, and since her father worked for the CBC, the family radio was often tuned in to the Corporation’s classical radio programming. Though that didn’t stop her from smuggling in a copy of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A from a local library—she hid the CD case under the front porch.
In her teen years, Measha spent several summers on scholarships at the Boston Conservatory and a New Brunswick choral camp. At high school, she met Markus Brügger, a Swiss exchange student. They combined their surnames (and anglicized his umlaut) when they married in 1999. He is now her full-time personal manager.
Brueggergosman made her stage debut at 20, playing the lead role—a slave girl who murders her abusive, incestuous master and father—in a major production of George Elliott Clarke and James Rolfe’s opera Beatrice Chancy. Her performance won rapturous reviews. Measha continued her schooling at her parents’ insistence. At the University of Toronto, she earned a Bachelor of Music under the tutelage of Mary Morrison, a brilliant soprano turned lauded professor.
“I didn’t choose U of T—I chose Mary Morrison,” she says. Despite receiving her degree nearly a decade ago, she remains a semi-regular on campus, where she has attended advanced voice lessons. “I’m sure that people there think I have a learning disorder,” she deadpans.
Hardly. Brueggergosman followed her B.Mus with a Master’s degree from Düsseldorf, Germany’s Robert Schumann Hochschule, or University of Music. Again, it was a professor who drew her in—Edith Wiens, the expatriate Canadian soprano who has become an expert in German “art” song, called lieder. The singers had met at U of T, when Wiens visited to teach a master class.
“Edith was a rockin’, wicked teacher. I wanted more of that,” Brueggergosman says. “And at that point, German was my weakest language. I was guided by my hunger to know more.” She is now fluent in German, along with English and French, and continues to study Italian, Latin and Spanish; the traditional languages of opera.
In Düsseldorf, Wiens developed Measha’s gift for recital, or chamber music. “She could find things in music that I just didn’t have the eyes and ears yet to see and hear myself,” Brueggergosman says. “By learning from her, I fell in love with art song and realized that it was really something that I could spend my whole life doing and still never get to the bottom of the repertoire.”
Indeed, it is recital, more than opera, where Brueggergosman has given her most confident performances, accompanied by a lone pianist. She has steered her career smartly, thus far avoiding demanding opera roles that are considered too “big” for young, developing singers. In the meantime, recital “serves as a kind of harbour, a safe haven, vocally,” she says.
Brueggergosman has described herself as a “missionary” for classical music. This past May, she returned to Park St. School, her old stomping grounds, to launch the New Brunswick chapter of Learning Through the Arts (LTTA). The international, non-profit organization develops arts-based lesson plans and curriculum for elementary and secondary schools. It puts artists in classrooms, and encourages new, effective methods of learning—studying chance and probability by composing music on a computer, for example.
As a goodwill ambassador for LTTA, Brueggergosman has opportunities to meet young musicians and pass along the wisdom of her own mentors. One piece of advice she shares is to exhaust all other options before embarking on a music career. “It’s hard and it’s competitive and it’s exhausting. So, if you don’t love it it’s going to be torture,” she says. Another is this: “For the pieces that you choose to play, make them sound as if the composer wrote them for you five moments ago. It’s a question of ownership—but don’t be so conceited as to think there’s nothing to left to learn.”