Finding Margaret Harshaw

How you do find a great teacher? The one that’s right for you? My own story is a circuitous one.

After teaching elementary and high school vocal music in the Midwest for a few years, I moved back east and found a private voice teacher in Philadelphia by the name of Florence Berggren. (How did I do that? By asking everyone I knew for their recommendation.) Berggren was in her 80s, had taught at Juilliard and Temple University, and counted Diana Soviero among her students. After six months of lessons where I sang nothing but French art songs, Berggren declared I would make a better conductor than a singer and set up an audition/interview with Fiora Contino, a noted opera conductor on Temple’s faculty. So I went and sang for Contino.

“What do you want to do?” Contino asked after I sang a few mélodie and an aria from the Le Nozze di Figaro. “I want to sing,” I replied. “Then go do that!” Contino said encouragingly. “You should look into Westminster Choir College in Princeton. I think you will do well there.”

So I did. I scoped out Westminster, got accepted into a master’s of vocal pedagogy and performance program, and studied with a teacher who was a student of Margaret Hoswell, whose teaching focused on vocalizing with “V.” Things hummed along until I jumped at the chance to have lessons with Margaret Harhaw—a visiting professor who made me sing as I had never sung before.

It didn’t occur to me that I needed permission (I didn’t). Nor did it occur to me that there would be consequences.

After my jury that year, my teacher gave me a letter booting me from the studio and remarked cryptically: “I suppose you will be going to Bloomington” —meaning Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where Harshaw taught. I wasn’t, unfortunately, which is a whole other story, one involving relationships, finances, and timing. But from my first lessons, Harshaw’s teaching became my fixation: one that continued during subsequent summers and lessons. (I also studied with two of her students.) What came to be—a singing career with the New York City Opera and Metropolitan Opera, an intense interest in historical vocal pedagogy, and my career as a voice teacher—came from that fixation.

Looking back now, I am grateful for Florence Berggren, who set things in motion by sending me to Fiora Contino, who in turn pointed me toward Westminster. I am also grateful to my teacher at Westminster: being booted out of that studio was the best thing for me. I must also thank my then-boyfriend who made the introduction to Harshaw—the most sacred of monsters who was born on this day in 1909.

Monstre Sacré—The French use the phrase to refer to somebody who has achieved extraordinary feats in a particular field, and whom few would dare to criticise. It relates to people who have had a long-standing career…

Here’s the thing. We don’t always know when we point ourselves in a certain direction where we are going to end up. We just know we have to follow our noses and stay the course, with desire, obsession, and intuition propelling us forward. For me, that started quite early after seeing Mary Poppins as a child. I simply had to sing.

Harshaw’s Muse-moment came when she sang in a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion with the Mendelssohn Club in Philadephia.

I suddenly became so emotionally involved that I no longer heard my father saying how silly it was. He just faded into the dust. When I came out of the concert I realized there was something to this singing business—this was what they meant by great music. I remember being really in a fog for several days. And then I said, “All right, now this is serious, I’ll take voice lessons.” My mother was always after me to take voice lessons, so I made a commitment. From then on, that was it. —Joan Evelyn Ames, Mastery, p 43.

That moment took Harshaw to Mary Lockhart March, a voice teacher in Philadelphia. Twenty-three-year-old Harshaw was a stenographer by day for the Bell Telephone Company and studied voice at night when she won 1000 dollars in a National Federation of Music Clubs competition. Jose Iturbi, a conductor born in Valencia, Spain, judged the 1935 competition and gave Harshaw her debut at the Robin Hood Dell in Philadelphia and with the Philharmonic Symphony at City College in New York City. Harshaw later entered the Juilliard School of Music and studied with Anna E. Schoen-René (Harshaw’s reviews during the period before her study with Schoen-René describe her voice as “reedy,” then afterward as “opulent”). The wheels set in motion by Mendelssohn sped onward to her debut and career with the Metropolitan Opera and an equally illustrious career as the doyenne of voice teachers.

Finding Harshaw at Westminster was a matter of fate. That’s how I think of it. I mean, how often do we meet or work with a sacred monster who changes the very fabric of our lives? Not very often. I am so grateful on this day, which would have been her 114th birthday.

Photo Credit: author’s collection.