Elizabeth Harwood

British opera singer

Elizabeth Harwood (27 May 1938 – 22 June 1990) was an English lyric soprano. After a music school, she enjoyed an operatic career lasting for over two decades and worked with such conductors as Colin Davis and Herbert von Karajan. She was one of the few English singers of her generation to be invited to sing in productions at the Salzburg Festival and La Scala, Milan, as well as at the Metropolitan Opera. After early performances at Glyndebourne and five years at Sadler's Wells Opera Company in the 1960s, Harwood sang at Covent Garden and Scottish Opera before building an international reputation in the 1970s. Her repertoire was extensive, but she was particularly notable for her performances in the operas of Mozart and Richard Strauss. In the concert hall, she performed in oratorio, and in her later years she concentrated on Lieder recitals. She died of cancer at the age of 52.

Harwood was born in Barton Seagrave, a suburb of Kettering, but grew up in Yorkshire. She attended Skipton Girls' High School. Her parents were both musical, and her mother, a professional soprano, taught her singing. Harwood later said of her childhood, "My mother sang under the name Constance Read, and she did quite a bit of early broadcasting from Birmingham. When she had her children – there were three of us – she did local singing and took up her teaching. My father, in the Methodist Chapel tradition, did a good deal of conducting". In 1957, for the Buxton Opera Group, she sang Michaela in Passion Flower, an adaptation of Carmen. In a student production of Massenet's Werther in 1958, she won praise as Sophie. At the age of 21, she won the Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Scholarship and spent a year in Milan studying with Lina Pagliughi. She was later a joint winner of the international Verdi competition in Busseto.

Harwood made her professional début as Second Boy in The Magic Flute at Glyndebourne in 1960. At a performance of Messiah in December 1960, Harwood's fellow soloists included Janet Baker, with whom she later made a series of critically praised appearances for Scottish Opera. In 1961 Sadler's Wells Opera Company engaged her, and she played Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto, Countess Adèle in Rossini's Le Comte Ory, and Phyllis in Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, in which the critic of The Gilbert and Sullivan Journal thought that "despite Elizabeth Harwood's beautiful singing, attractive costume and appearance, her spoken word was charged with innuendo, presenting a most worldly young lady". Her other early roles at Sadler's Wells included Mozart's Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro and Constanze in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, the title role in Massenet's Manon and of Richard Strauss's coloratura parts, Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos and the Fiakermilli in Arabella. as well as Sophie to Baker's Oktavian in Der Rosenkavalier. In 1967, Harwood had played Donna Elvira in the Aix en Provence Festival's production of Don Giovanni. She was invited back in 1969 for Acis and Galatea. Her success in this and in her Scottish Opera roles attracted the attention of Herbert von Karajan, who invited her to appear at the Salzburg Festival the following year. She made her début at La Scala, Milan, as Constanze in 1971 and played other roles there in 1972. Her last operatic performance was in 1983 in La colombe at Sadlers' Wells. Her final public performance was in November 1989 at the Bath Festival. In 1966, she married the businessman Julian A. C. Royle, a publisher of greetings cards. They had one son, Nicholas.</blockquote>

Janet Baker said this about Harwood: "Elizabeth was the most beloved of my colleagues, a beautiful person in every way. Her art lit up the stage." The Elizabeth Harwood Memorial Award for Singers is given every year by the Royal Northern College of Music.

Harwood made many recordings. Among her earliest were a series of Gilbert and Sullivan discs, beginning with an abbreviated The Mikado recorded in Hamburg in 1961 along with other selections for World Record Club discs. She was a guest artist for Decca with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1964 as Elsie in The Yeomen of the Guard and in the title role in Princess Ida. Under the baton of Karajan, she recorded the title role of The Merry Widow for Deutsche Grammophon, and Musetta in La bohème for Decca. In Benjamin Britten's recording of his A Midsummer Night's Dream, she sang Tytania. Her other opera recordings include Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet. A video recording of Harwood as Violetta in La traviata was issued in 1999. She appeared in the 1985 Tony Palmer film about Handel God Rot Tunbridge Wells!, singing 'I know that my redeemer liveth' from Messiah. She had only one solo recital disc, a selection of English art songs by Frederick Delius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frank Bridge, Arnold Bax, Michael Head, George Lloyd, and Roger Quilter recorded in London in 1983, released on the Conifer label, with John Constable on the piano. It has not been reissued on compact disc. Another disc of traditional English songs such as Cherry Ripe and Early One Morning was a joint recital with baritone Owen Brannigan from 1964, conducted by Charles Mackerras. In oratorio, Harwood was able to perform in both the traditional big scale Handelian style and the emerging smaller scale "period performance" style, recording the soprano part in Messiah for both Sir Malcolm Sargent, a traditionalist, and Charles Mackerras, whose 1967 recording was a landmark in period performance. There is a recording of "Rigoletto" from Sadler's Wells Opera, in English, with Elizabeth Harwood, Donald Smith, Peter Glossop, Donald McIntyre, with the Sadler's Wells Orchestra conducted by James Lockhart possibly 1963.