Something Is Always on Fire

by Measha Brueggergosman

  Securing management is when the real work begins. You now have actual personnel to help define and facilitate your goals. Can you articulate what those goals are? Be specific. If I didn’t know what I wanted out of this life and this job—and, more important, what I did not want—then the trusted custodians of my business would be left to guess if their efforts were bearing the kind of fruit I was hoping for. They’d be justified in their frustration when I wasn’t grateful or enthusiastic about all the hours they’d put in to get me something I ultimately didn’t want. If there’s a gig for no money that they deem strategic, then I have to get on board and believe it’s leading to bigger and better things. Meanwhile, if I wanna chase the rabbit and waste my time doing something for short-term gain, they have to put the brakes on and let me explain why. In a lot of ways, we’re starting from scratch, because as far as I know, the career I want isn’t one that currently exists.

  At the end of the day, to anyone chasing the dream of self-sufficiency, the collaborative scheme you’ve concocted within your “team” has to make everyone accountable for (and excited about) his or her contribution . . . and fanning the flame of its execution is your job. You are the focus of the picture and the flash that lights it up. I’m not saying that everyone’s a leader, but people won’t know how they fit in my life if I don’t know who I am and what I bring to the table. It’s so much better if everyone can be on the same page and take equal credit when things work out—but I’ve also accepted that it’s me who must bear the brunt of the load when they don’t.

  By the time this book is published, I’ll be forty years old. By now I have a very clear idea of my worth. I’ve learned to list my strengths before my weaknesses. I’ve worked hard and have a strong social game: I am kind and work well with others. I am a Queen . . . with a team spirit. I’ll listen to reason, but I know my own mind. I prefer to cultivate the tools to react to the unexpected and execute a strategy, not the other way around.

  I’d say that in the classical music industry, I have a reputation for being willing to try just about anything. I maintain a healthy song recital schedule—a typical program might include a combination of Ravel, Chausson, Duparc, Mahler, Strauss or Schoenberg. At this point, encores are likely to be Barber, Bolcom, a traditional spiritual or an off-beat song by Tom Lehrer—depending on how the wind blows. My operatic roles range from Elettra in Mozart’s Idomeneo to Madame Lidoine in Poulenc’s Les dialogues des Carmélites to Jenny in Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny; Generally, I’m cast as a whore or a nun. But either way, I’m usually dead at the end. (Although Jenny doesn’t physically die at the end of Mahagonny, she was dead inside from the beginning.)

  Adjacent to the wacky list of misfits I’ve gotten to sing are the works whose births have been entrusted to me: The premieres. A new work (sung in Cantonese) by Chinese composer Xiaogang Ye, commissioned by the Detroit Symphony and premiered at Lincoln Center in New York. Also, in the spring of 2016, Michael Tilson Thomas (MTTizzle, as I affectionately refer to him) wrote a thirty-minute tour de force for me called Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind (set to the poem of the same name by the American poet Carl Sandburg), which we premiered at Frank Gehry’s concert hall creation, the New World Center, in Miami. Most recently, I sang Miroslav Srnka’s new work Make No Noise, in a new production for the Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria.

  This Srnka situation was no joke. How did I know it was destined to be amazing? Because my purse was stolen from my best friend’s apartment in Toronto two days before I was to fly to Austria to start rehearsals. Keeping in mind that sometimes you are presented with a scenario that is so obviously a test (and that persecution breeds perseverance), everything I needed to work, travel and caffeinate was in that purse. In fact, I’d placed it by the door of my best friend’s apartment with the full knowledge that in a fire it would be the only thing I would need. I woke up the next morning and it was gone. Turns out, placing it next to the door also made it the perfect thing for a thief to grab and leave. And the weird thing was, nothing else was stolen. For the petty criminal, it was like my purse was everything anyone could ever hope for in a robbery and exactly what the thief had come for. And rightly so. Cell phone, computer, passport, all my ID, even my AeroPress coffee maker and freshly roasted Jonnie Java coffee from Fredericton. All zipped up and neatly packaged. I made it so easy.

  The thief also knew what he was doing. When I called Visa to cancel my credit cards (they were hopelessly overdrawn, anyway—suck it, thief!), the bank told me someone had already tried (unsuccessfully) to make a purchase at the grocery store down the road. The person had also turned off all my devices so I couldn’t use the app to find him. Bastard. I had to replace everything and had no money to do it.

  But I believe I said it was the best thing to happen to me? Maybe not the best thing ever, but because you need identification to get identification, after I tracked down my absolute favourite bank manager in the whole world at a CIBC in the west end of Toronto—the bank that gave me my first mortgage—I was able to replace my bank card, get access to my (limited) funds and begin the process of rebuilding.

  It is amazing how God can send you little shreds of encouragement as He brings you out of the fire. Close to ten years later and this wonderful woman was still working at the same bank branch, in the same office. She heard my voice on the phone (a landline, since my cell phone was in my stolen purse) and I hadn’t said two words before she screamed my name and asked me how I was doing. I’ve chosen to withhold her name but she knows who she is . . .

  I realized the passport was the most pressing item since my flight to Austria was scheduled for the next day, but even with a twenty-four-hour rush put on replacing it, I couldn’t produce the two pieces of government-issued photo ID required to process the application.

  I don’t think I exhaled all day. I felt mighty uncomfortable and exhausted (not to mention violated and betrayed), but through it all I could sense God’s hand over everything that was happening, and believe it or not, I felt His peace. I had a dear friend stick with me and help me get from place to place when I had no money to do it. It even turned out that the person at the passport office was at my last concert in Toronto and did everything in his power to help me. And my dear friend in Halifax used his Air Miles to get me to Halifax when it became apparent that I would need to go back home to replace my identification because I wasn’t in my province of residence when all my identification was stolen.

  The worst part—the thing that reeeally hurt—was that the thief, in addition to everything that could be wiped clean and resold, had also stolen my musical score. The hours of work I lost! I had explained my painstaking colour-coding process, along with the IPA symbols, the rhythmic transcription and all the accidentals, each handwritten beside every note. The technical cues, the little hints, the lines and connections drawn to melodies and pitches that would give me my entrance. All gone.

  If you’ll indulge me a teensy bit more—just to really drive it home how exceptionally bad it was to have this score taken from me—please allow me to do my best to describe the music of Make No Noise by Miroslav Srnka. Simply put, it was the hardest thing I’d had to learn in my career to date. Hands down. It could best be described as “word soup.” And I say that with complete affection! I happen to find “word soup” mighty tasty. To understand what I mean, simply bring to mind the most outlandish piece of experimental twenty-first-century music imaginable. Then play it backward with thrasher metal and wind chimes blaring in the background. Now try and find your starting pitch. Or the touchstone enharmonic structure within any given phrase. Anything that would conventionally be seen as providing some recognizable framework. You don’t get that from Srnka. Ever. And therein lies the genius.

  Forget any semblance of conventional rhythm. It was all metre changes and polyrhythms. Under normal circumstances, the quarter note in a simple metre time signature might get subdivided into triplets or quintuplets and maybe the occasional septuplet.
I had never actually seen a sixteenthlet until this piece. There are markings that I still don’t know what they mean. That would be like asking a deer in headlights to formulate a question before impact. There was so much black on the page I wasn’t sure if I was coming or going. Oh! And it was meant to sound like talking! Eeeasy and non-operatic. (Even above the staff.) With opera singers? This was Make No Noise.

  Miroslav Srnka is truly a great composer. He’s inspired and, as he would describe it, if he didn’t write it down—through the triumph of discomfort and hardship—it would drive him crazy until he did. And yes, he was regularly at rehearsals, in the flesh.

  By the time I’d gotten my passport replaced and was on a plane to Austria, the cast had already had close to a week of rehearsals. The piece’s first section (which I was still learning the notes for), had already been staged. Developing any level of comfort in a piece this impossible, and being a performer who does not like to be put through the humiliation and unprofessionalism of showing up less than prepared, I was sure this couldn’t be happening. Remember the Verdi Requiem in Peterborough in 1999? This experience took me right back there—only this time it was 2016 on the international stage at a prestigious music festival.

  Before I left Toronto for Bregenz, I had set up a pianist to work with me—sending her the score so she could get it under her fingers, because no one knew this piece since it had been written, like, five minutes ago. But none of my preparation happened, because my life blew up when my purse got stolen.

  As if that wasn’t enough pressure, this piece had been written for me and was meant to have been premiered by me a few years earlier, but I had been pregnant then and had had to cancel, so it got premiered with someone else. But it was always meant for me.

  When I arrived at rehearsal, as much as I wanted to believe everything would work out, my stress level was at fever pitch. I had been to the Bregenzer Festspiele the year before, to great success, and they had programmed Make No Noise only once I confirmed that I could do it. I was working with cast, conductor and director all for the first time. The only thing I had going for me in terms of a first impression was my smile. My preparation had been sabotaged by the theft of my purse.

  Every day I arrived at 7:00 a.m., two hours before everyone, and left at 9:00 p.m., after everyone. I worked and cried and sweated and practised. I knew in my gut that I would get there eventually, but I was genuinely scared. All. The. Time. Scared that I’d hold the production back, scared my colleagues would hate me, scared the conductor would yell at me, scared I’d be fired. Eventually, the conductor did yell at me, and it was singularly the worst moment of my professional life. I thought the ground would open and swallow me whole.

  He really laid into me, yelling everything I would yell at me if I were in his position:

  “This is unacceptable!”

  “How can you not know this by now?”

  “I’m doing everything in my power and you still can’t get it right?”

  Dude. Get out of my head.

  Everything he said was spot on, but it wasn’t who I was. I didn’t take it personally, because he wasn’t wrong. He was just responding to what was in front of him. He didn’t know me. He didn’t know the depth of my resolve. He didn’t know I wasn’t sleeping. What I didn’t know at the time was that during rehearsals for this opera, every performer, in his or her own way, would take a turn at having a mini breakdown. And it was completely understandable. We were short on time, the score was impossibly dense and the staging was incredibly ambitious.

  But in my heart of hearts I knew. I knew, I knew, I knew I would get this done. I was not going to be beaten by a stolen purse, an unlearnable score and an enraged conductor. This was not how my story ends. I felt this kind of force field around me keeping me on course and moving me forward. There was this reserve of energy that would kick in and wake me up around 6:00 a.m. and not deplete itself until 10:00 p.m., after I’d had a chance to decompress. The fear fell away and I had a mission. I was at war against myself and against the powers that would seek to destroy me and my reputation—the reputation I had worked close to two decades to build.

  As I slaved away trying to memorize (even though I had barely learned the nonsensical jumble of pitches), I believed that it was only a matter of time before all those black dots would start to make sense. If I trusted, put in the work and stayed the course, I would come from behind and elevate this production to the high standard it deserved, given the renown of the festival and the faith the organizers had put in me. Despite how devastated I was by the conductor humiliating me the way he did, I know he was a mechanism to get me where I needed to go. The leadership of the festival always had my back, and I am forever indebted to Elisabeth Sobotka, Olaf Schmitt and Nina Wolf. They honestly did everything they could to support and encourage me.

  Sure, it may not have been how I would have accomplished this goal, but I also understood that God needed to bring me out of a fire so intense that I would have no other recourse but to trust in Him and give Him the glory. I would be elevated from a professional disaster in order to breathe the fresh, rarified air on the mountaintop and give Him all the glory for it. To accomplish that, He needed for my purse to be stolen, my music not to be learned and the conductor to lose his s*** on me, in front of the whole cast and director.

  And I can tell you this: It tasted so sweet to finally feel like I was contributing the way I’d hoped I would. The early mornings and sleepless nights spent in focused study paid off big time—just like I knew they would. The violent tornado of mystery notes and rhythms swirling in my head at last took shape, and there was no finer feeling than knowing what music was coming next and when I was supposed to come in. It felt heavenly to hear and recognize the pitch I was about to sing, where I was supposed to be onstage and how I was supposed to feel about it.

  The new production of Make No Noise by Johannes Erath was breathtaking and I could finally enjoy it. It was staged in a basin of “oil”—a thick, gelatinous mix that got its deep, dark colour from coffee grinds—because the story took place on an oil rig, and figuratively, all the characters were toiling through their own traumas to somehow find each other through the thickness of their pasts. The metaphor of having to drag yourself through sludge to get where you need to go and become who you need to be was not lost on me. I enjoyed every single, solitary minute of that production, and it was the hardest professional experience of my life—mentally, musically and spiritually.

  But who could be with me except Jesus? Who could possibly understand the whirlwind of stress and disappointment but an empathetic God who wants me to be victorious according to His plan for my life? I came out of that production coated in titanium and ready for battle. And I would need it, because I came home to a husband hell-bent on divorcing me and a financial crisis that I had hoped would magically find its own solution. I hadn’t been in a hole this deep since I was in university when, with the last quarter to my name, I called my parents from a pay phone and asked them to please put five dollars into my account so I could withdraw it (when you could still withdraw five-dollar bills) and pay for the subway so I could get home from church. It was pretty dire.

  Two decades later, the circumstances might be different, but it’s still the same God.

  Moving forward into the next forty years, I consider what’s in front of me right now versus what I would like to see off in the distance. All the Meashas I have described in this memoir will continue their push-pull for supremacy. I want to continue to be grateful for all of it. To feel blessed in all things and perform every task—come what may—as unto the Lord. More specifically, I want to be healthy (as if anyone wants to be sick). I’d like to sing what I want with whomever I want, and I want to be able to live my faith without making people feel like I’m trying to convict or convert them. I don’t have that kind of pull and I don’t want the pressure of saving you. Plus, it’s honestly not my job to save you. My job is to love you with the love of the living God. I won’t
always succeed, but I’m talking about goals here, not slam dunks.

  I want to be a mother who is fully present and pursuing my dreams. I want my boys to grow up with a mother who is fulfilled by her work but is never happier than when she is holding them, helping them, cooking for them and listening to whatever it is they have to say.

  Time, perspective and immeasurable joy are what helped me to recognize the loss of my babies, my aorta exploding, my marriage ending and my career flourishing as the broadening and deepening of my humanity and faith. All the major transitions in my life, qualified by sadness or not, are invaluable lessons that I couldn’t trade, even if I wanted to. They certainly didn’t feel that way at the time, I can tell you. But as I come up to the next decade having seen my discomforts directly correlated to something that made me better and expanded my territory, my knee-jerk reaction to feel like the world is against me (or that God has abandoned me) has been replaced by the assurance that I’m going to be brought through this fire, refined and strengthened. When the smoke clears, I will still be standing at the end, and so will you!

  Whether the storms are here or their inevitable arrival is pending, some kind of hurricane, tornado, firestorm or angry mob will catch up with us all eventually. They may come for you by name, or they may come for your ideas or for what separates them from you. Your job is to develop a tolerance for the heat, and thus manage and control the temperature of your own life. Your job is to build that bridge that brings you together. Pressure, circumstance, livelihood, responsibility: all metaphors for the fires that burn in our lives. For the heat that threatens to consume us, but that also keeps us warm enough to survive. And if you want it to run hot, then you had better like to sweat. And if you like it on the cooler side, you had better get a thick skin. Even if what they say about you is true (indeed, especially if what they say about you is true), only you can decide which fires need tending and when.