Kathryn Harries (1951-2023) – A Personal Appreciation
It is one of the oddities of the lives of performers that, like sportsmen, they flourish for a while, and then disappear from view, only to appear in obituaries when most people thought they were long dead. There has been a spate recently of great singers from the era when I was young, who I had no idea had lived into their 80s and 90s, and who have only just died and been remembered. This longevity is a great thing, and may be due to their excellent breathing techniques, nurtured by years of training, although the regular regimes of late night eating and partying after performances may have kept the numbers down.
Unfortunately, this is not the case with the wonderful soprano/mezzo, Kathryn Harries, who has sadly died at the age of 72. I worked with Kathryn on several occasions, notably in Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ with Scottish Opera and Janáček’s ‘Jenůfa’, with the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, both of which were memorable for different reasons.
She was born in Hampton Court in South West London, to Welsh parents, and was a late starter in opera. Having trained at the Royal Academy, she became a voice and piano teacher at Kingston Polytechnic, and in 1977, was chosen to present a BBC School’s Music Programme, ‘Music Time’. Encouraged by friends, she was cast as a Flowermaiden in Welsh National Opera’s ‘Parsifal’ in 1983, and almost instantly found herself singing leading roles at Welsh and elsewhere, singing Sieglinde for WNO the next year, in 1984, and Kundry, the lead female role in ‘Parsifal’ at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1986! While still a Flowermaiden in 1983, she went on as an understudy the same season, as Leonore in ‘Fidelio’, standing in for an indisposed Anne Evans. This caused such a sensation, that she was cast as Leonore in a production of ‘Fidelio’ with Scottish Opera the following year. This was where I first met Kathryn. The original Scottish Opera production had opened in 1970, but this revival stood up well to the passing of time. The opera was given an impressive run of 15 performances, in six venues, from September to November, and starred Kathryn as Leonore, John Treleavan as Florestan, Bill McCue as Rocco, and Hartmut Welker as Pizarro. I was in my third season as a company bass, contracted for entire seasons to sing smaller roles and understudy larger ones. It was a great training, sadly unimaginable nowadays financially, and I was cast as Don Fernando, the Deus ex Machina figure who appears at the end and puts everything in order. It’s a lovely little role, with a chance to sing nobly and expressively, and make an impression on the audience. Kathryn was great to work with, and with her experience as a teacher and on TV, was able to help me, at that time raw and inexperienced on stage (aged 28), to at least ‘appear’ strong and dominant in my scene. I had already made a faux pas with Sir Alexander Gibson, legendary founder and musical director of Scottish Opera, by asking him if his beat could be a little clearer. The sharp intake of breath from the entire assembled company should have alerted me to the inadvisability of this approach, but I blundered on. Alec, who was a teddy bear really, showed remarkable patience with this young tyro, and informed me that I needn’t worry. “Just sing the ….ing thing, son, and I’ll follow you!” People breathed again, and I felt justified. Kathryn beamed at me, and we carried on. It was a terrific show, and Kathryn, despite being actually less experienced than me, sang brilliantly night after night.
Except, on the last night at the Playhouse in Edinburgh, with a huge audience of well over 2000 people, she took ill at the interval, and couldn’t sing. There being no understudy at that stage, the audience was sent home, and neither John Treleavan nor I appeared that night. People often express amazement when disasters like this occur, expecting understudies to emerge blinking into the light, and taking their chance to become stars, but really, on reflection, opera companies, other than the huge ones like the Met or Covent Garden, can’t possibly afford to have understudies on call each night in the theatre. Anyone who can sing such a big role is not going to be paid enough to travel round the country, on the off chance of going on. In my experience, only the Met has enough resources to pay enough to get decent singers to sit in the Green Room all night, watching someone else sing the role. When I covered La Roche in Strauss’s ‘Capriccio’ at the Met, they paid me a four figure fee to do just that. Excruciating, but lucrative.
Kathryn went on to be a big star in the opera world, combining a quality voice with a magnificent stage presence. Tall and slim, she was excellent in dominant female roles, as well as trouser roles like Leonore and the Composer in ‘Ariadne. I met her again in Amsterdam, in a strong production of ‘Jenůfa’, in 2001, when she sang the imperious Kostelnička, the stepmother of the ‘heroine’, Jenůfa, who murders her stepdaughter’s baby. I have to say that I find many of Janacek’s operas distasteful, despite the wonderful music, and I was quite pleased that I was only singing the relatively small and unimportant role of the village Mayor in Amsterdam. It did give me a chance to watch the principal singers at close quarters, and I was impressed by the quality of Kathryn’s singing and the visceral nature of her acting. She was once again a kind and sympathetic colleague, and I enjoyed her company in a cast which was very international. It had been an extremely busy year for me, with two different productions of Mozart’s ‘Marriage of Figaro’, one at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, and the other at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and so the rehearsal period in Amsterdam was something of a paid holiday. I had managed to rent an apartment in one of the glorious old houses on the banks of the Prinsengracht, the longest of the four main canals in the city, and it was a delight to stroll through those lovely old streets and across the many canal bridges to the theatre. One day, on the way to an afternoon rehearsal, I met up with Kathryn and another colleague, and we were wandering along through the town when we saw a large number of people looking in the window of an electrical goods shop. Intrigued, we stopped to look, and remained there for over an hour, as we watched the horrendous pictures of the 9/11 attack on New York. Being live, there was none of the filtering we have seen since, and so we watched the sickening sight of the planes crashing into the buildings, and the horrendous aftermath. Obviously, all rehearsals were cancelled for that day and the next as the world came to terms with the shock, but I think the experience brought the cast even closer together. Kathryn was a very calming influence on us all. It seems that her career changed around that time as well, after a couple of extremely difficult problems with her voice and overwork, and it came as no surprise to see her taking over as director of the National Opera Studio in London, and using her experience as a performer and teacher to mentor many of the best young singers in the country. She also involved herself in a number of charities, taking part in many sponsored walks to raise money for various good causes.
I had no idea that she had been ill, and so it came as a terrible shock to hear that she had died, after being diagnosed with cancer. She was a lovely lady, with an extraordinary voice, who could sing soprano roles and mezzo roles apparently at will. She was able somehow to adjust the timbre of her voice to fit in with the role, darkening or lightening the sound as necessary. This is a very rare skill. The only other singers I can think of with a similar felicity were Jessye Norman and Christa Ludwig, interestingly also starting as mezzos.
She was taken too early, but won’t be forgotten.
