A cherished signed programme that I took away from a concert performance of Britten’s War Requiem in 1987 evokes a lost era: it features conductors Mstislav Rostropovich and Richard Hickox and soloists Heather Harper, Robert Tear and John Shirley-Quirk. Harper was one of a number of singers (along with the likes of Shirley-Quirk, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Janet Baker) whom I personally caught, heard and met in the twilight of a career extended beyond natural retirement age. Each had achieved this by taking great care of their voice, but also by bringing such profound insight, artistry and intelligence to their singing that any minor technical deficiencies were sublimely overshadowed.

Harper was also a delight to meet, as modest as she was extraordinary. Still singing luminously as she approached her sixties, she represented a living link to the golden days of early stereo recording, the first great Mahler revival and the white heat of Britten’s Aldeburgh. By working consistently with Britten for over a decade and creating leading roles for him, yet never aspiring to join his inner circle, Harper achieved the near-impossible. Not only did she possess a remarkable technique, but also she was one of the most intelligent and thoughtful musicians of her generation and a near-definitive Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes – an interpretation she committed to record in her glorious prime.

Harper grew up in a musical household and two of her three siblings also enjoyed successful musical careers, both as instrumentalists. All the Harper children learnt the piano from the age of four, and just after her fifth birthday, Heather and her sister Alison publicly performed a dance routine together (as ‘Two Cute Kids’) at Belfast’s Hamilton School of Dancing; within two years she graduated to a solo role there.

In 1944 the 13-year-old Heather came third in a solo violin competition at the Belfast Musical Festival, at which she starred throughout her teenage years as both string player and pianist. She won a scholarship to study the piano in London, but after a year of instrumental studies she won a second scholarship, to study singing. She subsequently credited her singing teacher Helene Isepp, a refugee from post-Anschluss Vienna who also taught Janet Baker (among others), with truly discovering and shaping her prowess as a singer. She was always proud of her Belfast roots, never losing her distinctive accent; and it irked her when she was described as ‘the English soprano’.

Harper moved rapidly through the ranks. Her first recording appears to have been as the First Witch in Dido and Aeneas (the cast including Adele Leigh), briefly available in the UK in 1952 on Nixa records; but the crucial early breakthrough came when Isepp recommended her to Jack Westrup for his production of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Oxford University Opera Club in 1954, in which she took the role of Lady Macbeth. One or two early reviews praised both her singing and her acting but were critical of her diction. As her recordings eloquently testify, it must have been a shortcoming she rapidly addressed, with customary determination.

In October 1955, Harper was chosen from a large field of hopefuls to perform as Violetta (renamed Marguerite Gautier, as per Dumas fils’s novel) in a television production of La traviata (broadcast on one occasion immediately after a live relay of ‘Floodlit Association Football: Third Division North v. Third Division South’, with commentary by Kenneth Wolstenholme). In February 1956 she created the role of Luisita in Arthur Benjamin’s Mañana, based on a short story by Caryl Brahms, the first opera ever commissioned for TV by the BBC; and in May 1956 she was seen on the small screen as Mimì. As her later minting of Mrs Coyle in the premiere of Britten’s own TV opera Owen Wingrave demonstrated, this was a medium to which Harper was unusually well suited. At Sadler’s Wells in 1957 she performed in Benjamin’s revision of his ‘romantic melodrama in six scenes’ A Tale of Two Cities, the Daily Mail praising her for ‘loveliness of voice partnering the beauty that Lucie Manette must have’.

She was also a star of the concert platform, in constant demand for a wide range of repertoire – by Beethoven (whose Missa solemnis was a choice for her in a 1969 edition of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs), Berg, Delius, Handel, Mahler, Strauss, Vaughan Williams and Webern. By the time of her first professional singing performance in her home city of Belfast, in December 1955 at the age of just 25, she was already quite the star (though she still stayed with her aunt and uncle in the southern suburbs of the city). Capitalising on her TV fame, she travelled widely in the British Isles. In Neath, south Wales, in December 1956 she sang Elijah alongside the legendary Hervey Alan; and in May 1957 she was at the Assembly Hall in Worthing singing The Song of Hiawatha. ‘You must go to where the work is, and you must not be afraid of hard work,’ she said in a 1975 interview (Belfast Telegraph). Between 1956 and 1981, she appeared in every BBC Proms season at the Royal Albert Hall (she even came out of retirement in 1994 to sing in two of that year’s Proms), including no fewer than 10 performances of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, and two (1963 and 1964) of Britten’s War Requiem alongside Peter Pears and Thomas Hemsley.

Similar fame came on the operatic stage. She first sang in the Glyndebourne Chorus in 1955, graduating to named roles between 1957 and 1966, singing in works by Mozart, Stravinsky and Handel. In 1960 she starred in the first staged performance in the UK of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, for the New Opera Company at Sadler’s Wells, the Daily News (London) noting, ‘Miss Harper coped valiantly with the exacting vocal line.’ Her Covent Garden debut came two years later. Sadly, she was never invited to London to sing the role of the Marschallin, for which she was so well suited, though she did perform it in Toronto (for a Metropolitan Opera tour) and in Amsterdam. In both 1967 and 1968 she sang Elsa in Lohengrin at Bayreuth – in 1967 under Rudolf Kempe, whom she greatly admired, earning superb reviews. The 1967 leading man Sándor Kónya was frequently indisposed, so she sang with five different Lohengrins in that season (a recording of her July 30 performance with James King in the title-role is available on Orfeo). She was a frequent and much-beloved guest artist at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, which is where she met and fell in love with Eduardo Benarroch, who would become her second husband.

The moment of greatest opportunity (and possibly greatest risk too) came in spring 1962, when the Soviet authorities capriciously reneged on an agreement to allow Galina Vishnevskaya to fly to the UK for the world premiere of Britten’s War Requiem at Coventry Cathedral. With just 10 days’ notice, Harper, who was already expecting to be in that city for the role of Helena in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, stepped in. Within two days, she was note-perfect. Her understudy for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jeannette Sinclair, had agreed to stand in for her, but on the evening between the two performances of the War Requiem, Harper was called upon to play Helena after all, deputising for the stricken Sinclair. When Vishnevskaya was duly allowed to come to London for the Decca recording sessions that led to one of the most legendary gramophone record albums ever made, Harper was characteristically gracious and philosophical. Indeed, she once explained: ‘Of course there are a number of people who are real “prima donnas” but those who set themselves up as such are vocally immature. I don’t do that kind of thing. It is not in my nature. Irish people are down-to-earth people.’ So here’s to Heather Harper: truly a down-to-earth, Irish icon.

Essential Recording

Britten War Requiem

Heather Harper sop Philip Langridge ten John Shirley-Quirk bar St Paul’s Cathedral Choir, London Symphony Chorus and Orchestra / Richard Hickox

Chandos (11/91)

At last, after almost 30 years and still in fine voice, Heather Harper set down her interpretation of one of the defining soprano roles of the post-War era. It’s a recording to cherish – by any standards.