It started with tightness in the chest and pressure in the throat—never a good sign in general, but particularly ominous when you’re a singer. Still, Measha Brueggergosman’s fast-lane (and, indeed, high-stress) lifestyle seemed like the easy culprit. When the Canadian soprano first went to St. Joseph’s Health Centre near her Toronto home, doctors wrote it off as hypertension and high blood pressure. When the problems persisted the next day, Brueggergosman’s family doctor sent her back to Toronto General’s ER, where it was discovered that her aorta had burst. Six hours later, surgeons were sawing through her sternum to perform open-heart surgery. Understandably, Brueggergosman felt a bit “bamboozled” by her body, from which she had shed 150 pounds and was continuing to fine tune through her studies of Bikram yoga. Unsurprisingly, music was the last thing on the soprano’s mind as she went under.
“As I was counting back from 100, right before my surgery when they were giving the anesthesia to me, I wasn’t thinking about all the singing I’d done,” Brueggergosman says via phone from a New York hotel room. “I was thinking about all the time I should have been spending with my parents and my nieces and nephews and all of my family. I mean, I love singing—don’t get me wrong—but I think we have to acknowledge that the careers to which we give so much would never give us the same in return.”
Nearly 18 months to the day since her June 10, 2009, surgery, Brueggergosman sashayed onto the stage of Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, resplendent in a glittering black dress that showed off her dramatic weigh loss. With a burst of white tulle at the bottom offering glimpses of her bare feet (a frequent concert quirk that saves her the stress of covering her size 11 feet), she looked like she was floating on a cloud. It was an apt visual for Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, accompanied by the Risør Chamber Music Festival—clarinetist Martin Fröst and pianists Marc-André Hamelin and Leif Ove Andsnes.
Dusky to begin with, Brueggergosman’s distinctive voice sounded more grounded post-operation, but it did not lose the soaring, crystalline top that has made this soprano a superstar. In comparison to her 2007 Zankel Hall debut, the music now starts from a deeper place within: her shoulders heaved with the desire and longing of Mahler’s titular wayfarer and her eyes anticipated every emotion as it crept up in the text. In “Ich hab’ein glühend Messer,” each of the three repetitions of “O weh!” struck a unique emotional chord, akin to a Stanislavskian interpretation of Hamlet’s “Words, words, words.” Most importantly, however, Brueggergosman seemed happier than ever to be performing music for an audience. Her career may not be giving her all that she gives it in return, but it’s coming close.
“I sing from a different place, and I think after having almost died two years ago, I sing from a much more joyful place,” Brueggergosman explains. “I mean, singers are insane. We go through this unnatural process, stand up in front of however many thousands of people—sometimes on a daily basis—and some of us have no idea why. That’s not really acceptable in a career where you have such a large responsibility.”
Crediting her Type-A personality, Brueggergosman made a speedy recovery that was frankly flooring. She spent a month of doctor-ordered rest at home with family (her parents made the 26-hour trek from their native New Brunswick to Toronto) and went back to performing just one month later, on August 9 in a concert with Ontario’s Shaw Festival. “I wanted to get back to work as quickly as possible, if only to prove a point,” she says. “I just focused on receiving signals from my own body . . . I know that healing is an ongoing thing.”
As part of the healing process, Brueggergosman turned back to her studies of Bikram yoga, studies that she began in the fall of 2006—and, prior to her surgery, studies she planned to accelerate by becoming a Bikram teacher. She became certified last spring (celebrating her one-year post-surgical “birthday” with classmates) and now teaches yoga wherever her singing career takes her. The second profession has proven to be a “blessing” for the soprano: whereas she feels that her performances affect audiences with a delayed reaction—“planting a seed,” as she describes it—the effects of her yoga instruction are immediate.
“In the yoga room, I watch them change their lives,” Brueggergosman says. “I watch them choose whether to do the posture or not, I watch them grab their ankles for the first time or touch their chin to their chest or their forehead to their knee.”
When she begins to talk about yoga, her speaking voice—already an Eartha Kitt purr—gets lower, even more grounded. For the soprano, the past year has been a time of exploration and information gathering, from the biography of Paramahansa Yogananda to the Bible to Eat, Pray, Love,. “I swear, you read the first 30 pages of that book, that is my life,” she says of Gilbert’s bestselling memoir of divorce and rejuvenation across Italy, India, and Indonesia. “You feel a shift coming—and if you fight it, it’s always going to end in tears. But if you just acknowledge it, welcome it, talk to it [and] deal with it, it’s so much better.” The unifying factor for the manifold facets of Brueggergosman’s life, however, has been her yoga practice. Aptly enough, yoga—as she points out—is the Sanskrit word for “union.”
With a profession that is often a solitary one with practice, traveling, rehearsing, and—perhaps the most social yet still isolating aspect—performing, the communal experiences in the yoga studio give Brueggergosman a chance to strengthen her art and escape her head space. As she explains, “A lot of my yoga practice has to do with silencing that voice that would have you come out of the posture or not remember the words or think negative thoughts or dwell on things that aren’t important. . . . It kind of speaks to the psychology of singing, which is something we should really know a lot more about than we do.”
Delving into her own psychology when it comes to making music, Brueggergosman views singing as “an act of servitude,” later adding that, as a self-proclaimed keeper of the grail, “I feel like I’m also the protector of a repertoire that would otherwise fall into obscurity were it not for me believing so strongly in it.” On the flip side of the coin, yoga is a service station that allows Brueggergosman to increase her generosity as a singer.
“The union of the body and the mind make moving through this life almost effortless,” she says before qualifying, “That’s not to say when my luggage is lost or the car’s not there to pick me up from the airport, when things go wrong, I’m not taking deep controlled breaths,” she laughs. “But [yoga] brings a lot of things into perspective, and singing brings me great joy when the rest of my life is organized.
“But there can’t be a separation,” she adds. “I can’t be disorganized and unhinged in one area of my life and not have it affect who I am as a singer. I’m currently working on unifying the many things . . . you know women do that all the time. Because we are natural, inherent multitaskers.” Brueggergosman cautions, however, that multitasking can lead to nothing getting done if there is chaos. Her current focus is eliminating that chaos from her own life, on both personal and professional levels. She considers the summer of her operation and this past summer—both spent with her family—to be the happiest times in recent memory and something she would like to get back to more often (she counts herself fortunate enough to have spent this last Christmas with her parents and will often fly them out to where she is performing).
As a performer, however, Brueggergosman looks forward to doing less. On the day that we spoke, she had just wrapped up a run as Jenny in a pole-dancing, glue-sniffing version of Kurt Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in Madrid. Under iconoclastic impresario Gérard Mortier, the production brought in an element of sociopolitical commentary on Spain’s environmental policies. (Brueggergosman admits that operas with a social or political leaning, whether in subject matter or direction, will be something she always jumps at.) In January of this year she sang the role of Sister Rose in Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking with Houston Grand Opera, and in February she returned to Carnegie Hall with pianist Justus Zeyen and a recital program comprised of languid and sexy art songs by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Duparc, Turina, Chopin, Strauss, and Berg (based on her latest Deutsche Grammophon recording, Night and Dreams). This spring she also tackles the role of Vitellia in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito with Toronto’s Opera Atelier.
The myriad of roles and styles are part of Brueggergosman’s 365 days of exploration and journey to achieve balance. There have been some missteps—she admits now that promoting Night and Dreams with a recital tour while simultaneously learning new operatic rep was not the shrewdest move. Brueggergosman doesn’t come off, however, as someone afraid of making a mistake. If she’s only going to go around once on earth, she’s going to take chances toward finding happiness. Her love of variety was what originally led her into the territory of art song (which she studied under Edith Wiens in Germany, a teacher whose career she coveted with a high emphasis on concerts coupled with the occasional opera).
The process is also a way to allow Brueggergosman’s voice to grow organically and gradually. “For me in my development, [concert rep] was a really helpful tool to keep the voice kind of under raps or progressing at a decreased physiological rate, not doing too much too soon and too heavy repertoire too early. Plus, there’s so much of that repertoire that goes unsung, particularly by larger voices,” she adds with a laugh. “And I also would like to maintain a certain amount of versatility because I am usually too distracted.” Operatically, the right projects have begun to present themselves as well, but in this transitory year, Brueggergosman doesn’t anticipate taking on too much too soon.
“I’m 33 now. I want to remain healthy and happy and productive,” she says. “So for me the question isn’t very specific roles so much as it is getting a life that is going to keep me and, by proxy, those around me happy and satisfied.”
