It’s one of those moments when you know you’re having a moment. In a little chapel like so many little chapels in so many little towns in the very bosom of France, an opera recital whirs while I stand watching the great American soprano Jessye Norman. For once, the diva-to-the-max is not in the spotlight, although missing her here would have been like missing the nose on Owen Wilson’s face.

Norman, who’s spent much of her life making clichés like “force of nature” come true, sits splendidly in the front, mouthing back every word coming from the singers onstage. The whites of her eyes do a jig. They look on with a watchmaker’s attention to detail and a madam’s knowledge of the world. She has on an enormous head scarf too – a look halfway between beautiful and foolish, the Queen of Sheba meets the Cat in the Hat.

“Shhhhh,” blows a woman near me during a particularly gripping passage of Handel in a room that’s brought out scores of largely leisure-wearing French country folk to the medieval-of-nowhere town Villecroze (a town so remote that when I check into my inn they don’t ask me for money or a credit card or a passport; they simply say, “Bienvenue”). Tonight is a night where there is Bellini and Bizet, Schubert and Strauss, and an actual dog barking right outside the chapel while Wagner howls inside. The paint on the walls is chipped but artfully so. Some grey ladies, unable to find a seat, loll like birds on a winding staircase at the back. During a snippet by Canada’s aria-slinging superstar Measha Brueggergosman, a young man with a Karl Lagerfeld-style ponytail wells up and delicately starts to drip.

The concert is a high note in a week built around high notes. In a part of Peter Mayle’s Provence where the things they typically make are ceramic pots and rosé, music is what they’ve been making this week. Take one living legend, a hilltop vista and six or so up-and-coming operatic lovelies, and you’ve got what they call a “master class.” Brought together by the Académie musicale de Villecroze, these canaries – including my good friend Measha – have come together to learn everything there is to learn from Ms. Norman.

Luckily, I’m along for the ride. Indeed, when I first arrive at the school, I quickly learn how steeped the place is in classical music – even down to the security code for the building. “The code is Brahms’ birthday,” Measha tells me on that first day. I smile a bewildered smile. “1833,” she shoots back.

A master class is not just any class. It’s a grand tradition in the cobwebbed world of opera – a definite passing of the diva baton. Norman is there as one part mystic (there to pass on her sorceress secrets) and one part Richard Simmons (there to whip them into shape).

It’s quite something spending time with a pack of divas-in-training. The only thing better perhaps would be spending a few days with a pack of bakers-in-training, so sweet are the sounds coming from behind corners and hidden doors everywhere I turn. There is also an opportunity for much hilarity. When I first meet the whole lot of them – in saucy Saint-Tropez, a couple of hours away – the singer from Korea quickly sizes me up. Or rather, my voice.

“You’re a tenor, aren’t you?” she asks. “You must be a tenor.”

“No, I’m a journalist,” I tell her.

“No, you’re a tenor.”

Okay, I’m a secret tenor, I eventually admit to appease her. I’m a tenor on a very covert mission.

But is it scary performing for the great Jessye Norman? Measha shakes her head. “It’s because Jessye is so generous and kind,” she tells me. “She’s a diva but in the best sense of the word.”

Indeed, she’s even extraordinarily human in surprising ways. One night, after they’ve all sung “till they dropped,” Norman stays to party. It is there, where the couscous is being passed around and the wine glasses constantly refilled, that she reveals her favourite writer. Turns out the woman once described as the “virtual incarnation of the mask of tragedy” because of all the cursed women she has played has a real thing for John Grisham. Yes! Not only that, but Norman has quite a bit to say about Brad and Angelina.

Or was that Brahms and Angelina? 

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Shinan Govani is the Scene columnist for the National Post and frequently appears on television commenting on celebrities and the social whirl. Write him at sgovani@enroutemag.net.