Obituary, Heather Harper (1930-2019)

The soprano Heather Harper, who sang in the first performance of Britten’s War Requiem and created the role of Mrs Coyle in his Owen Wingrave, has died aged 88.

Harper was born into a musical family in Belfast in 1930, and began piano lessons at an early age along with her siblings; her brother and sister went on to become professional orchestral musicians, and Harper initially trained as a first-study pianist at Trinity School of Music in London.

She began her singing career as a mezzo-soprano with various professional choirs including the Ambrosian Singers and the BBC Chorus, making her solo operatic debut as Verdi’s Lady Macbeth with Oxford University Opera Group in 1954 (her regular collaborator Janet Baker would debut with the same company two years later). Verdi, however, would not figure prominently in her future; instead, she established herself in the weightier Mozart roles and eventually gravitated towards German lyric-dramatic repertoire such as Strauss’s Arabella, Chrysothemis (Elektra), Empress (Die Frau ohne Schatten) and Marschallin (Der Rosenkavalier), and Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin, which she sang at Bayreuth in 1967 under Rudolf Kempe (a live recording is available on Orfeo).

In the course of her work with the English Opera Company, Harper established a long-term working relationship with Benjamin Britten and became closely associated with several of the roles which he composed for the soprano Joan Cross, including the Governess in The Turn of the Screw and Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes. In May 1962 she sang in the premiere of his War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral on just over a week’s notice when visa issues prevented the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya from taking part; though Vishnevskaya sang on Britten’s subsequent studio recording of work on Decca, a live recording of the premiere was issued on Testament several years ago, and Harper went on to record the piece with Richard Hickox in the early 1990s. Shortly after the premiere of the War Requiem, Harper made her Covent Garden debut as Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in 1970 she created the role of Mrs Coyle in Owen Wingrave, which was broadcast on BBC2 the following year.

Harper also premiered several works by Sir Michael Tippett, including the Third Symphony in 1972 and The Ice Break (in which she sang the role of Nadia) in 1989. Her interest in twentieth-century music also extended to the Second Viennese School; she sang The Woman in the first UK staging of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, and appears on Pierre Boulez’s recording of the complete works of Webern. (She and Boulez also made a Grammy-winning recording of Ravel’s Shéhérazade in the 1970s; Gramophone described Harper as ‘at the height of her powers’ on this relatively rare foray into French repertoire on disc, and ranked the recording as ‘among the best available’ of the work).

Even after taking on relatively heavy roles in the opera-house, Harper retained the vocal freshness and flexibility to shine in baroque repertoire, and her recordings of the St John Passion (in English) with Britten and Messiah with Sir Colin Davis on Philips are among the highlights in her discography. She also recorded Mahler’s Eighth Symphony with Sir Georg Solti and Delius’s A Mass of Life with Sir Charles Groves, both in 1971.

Though Harper stepped away from opera in the mid-80s and devoted herself to teaching, she came out of retirement for the premiere of The Ice Break and for a concert of Berg and Vaughan Williams with Simon Rattle at the BBC Proms in 1994. Her awards and honours include a CBE in 1965 and an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast. She is survived by her second husband, the Argentine music critic Eduardo Benarroch, whom she married in 1973.

Heather Harper - ten key recordings