The designation of voice types in opera is always a hazardous business, but a minority of singers simply defy categorisation. One such was Kathryn Harries, who has died aged 72 of cancer. When she auditioned as a teenager for the Royal Academy of Music in London, she told a sceptical panel that her range was from C below middle C to F above top C. That range of three and a half octaves enabled her to glide effortlessly through both soprano and mezzo-soprano roles, her best known including Sieglinde (Die Walküre), Dido (Les Troyens) and Kostelnička (Jenůfa). Although she later concentrated on a somewhat narrower pitch range, she continued to sing both soprano and mezzo roles, gradually settling more on the latter.
Her tonal quality was similarly unique, as she was well aware: “They either like me or don’t like me. It must be very nice to be Renée Fleming, because everyone loves you,” she once said. It was not only that vocal quality but also her manner of delivery (in early years she was sometimes criticised as an overly cerebral performer) that polarised opinion. Nonetheless she remained faithful to her instinctive approach, winning countless admirers for her intelligent and psychologically penetrating portrayals.
Despite her five years at the Royal Academy, she was a late starter in opera, making her stage debut at the age of 32 as a Flowermaiden in the Welsh National Opera Parsifal (1983). She had taken voice lessons from Constance Shacklock, with piano as a second subject, also studying harmony with Delius’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby.
Having taught singing and piano at Kingston Polytechnic, south-west London, she was selected in 1977 to present Music Time, a BBC schools television programme aired twice weekly requiring her and her co-host, Peter Combe (and later Andrew C Wadsworth), to sing, and play the guitar and piano. She remained in the job for four years until her colleague at Kingston, Meirion Bowen, steered her towards the Ingpen and Williams agency, who in turn landed her the Flowermaiden role. Unfulfilling as she found that, she underwent a baptism of fire when she was asked to deputise for Anne Evans as Leonore in Fidelio in Liverpool.
By this time she was married with two young children, but her operatic career began to take off. She was noticed as a highly promising young Sieglinde in Welsh National Opera’s The Valkyrie (1984), for which she was coached by Reginald Goodall, and within two years was singing Kundry in Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, returning there as Gutrune in Die Götterdämmerung.
Other roles she undertook for WNO included Adalgisa in Norma, Gutrune, and the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos. For English National Opera she sang a number of roles between 1983 and 1990, including Irene (Rienzi), the Female Chorus (Rape of Lucretia), Eva (Die Meistersinger), Donna Anna (Dargomyzhsky’s The Stone Guest) and the title role in Kátya Kabanová.
For Scottish Opera she created the title role in Edward Harper’s Hedda Gabler (1985), later singing Senta in Der Fliegende Holländer and Bartok’s Judith. For Opera North (1986–88) she sang Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni) and Hanna Glawari (The Merry Widow). She first performed at Covent Garden as Sieglinde in the WNO Ring (1986) and made her Royal Opera debut as the Protagonist in Berio’s Un Re in Ascolto (1989).
Her searing Kostelnička in Jenůfa was heard at Glyndebourne, as well as in mainland Europe and the US. Her Kabanicha in Kátya Kabanová also exploited the powerful chest range of her voice. In the role of Dido (which she sang in the first complete performance of Les Troyens in France at the 1987 Berlioz festival in Lyons, as well as for Scottish Opera and elsewhere) her regal bearing, gloriously golden tone and seamless legato were deployed to great advantage.
She was born in Hampton Court, south-west London, to Welsh parents, and went to Surbiton high school. Her father, Stanley, was a pharmacist; her mother, Gwyneth (nee Hubbard), trained as a singer, but gave up the idea of a professional career in favour of her family and the pharmacy.
Not all the roles Harries undertook were equally successful – her Kátya and Carmen were both criticised for different reasons – as she was the first to acknowledge. Harsh economic realities played their part in the choice of roles accepted, but coping with the pressures of balancing career and family, together with the resultant illnesses, also had a deleterious effect at some junctures in her career. In the 1980s she became susceptible to asthma, bronchitis and hayfever, necessitating slow-release steroid injections to get her through performances.
By the end of the decade, the health problems, coupled with the financial drain of childcare, were reaching a crisis. In 1991, after an exhausting fortnight shuttling between a Covent Garden Götterdämmerung (Gutrune) and Un Re in Ascolto in Paris (11 performances in 13 days), she succumbed to flu just as rehearsals were due to start for Les Contes d’Hoffmann (Giulietta) at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Threatened with dismissal if she did not turn up for the first rehearsal, she coughed her way through the rehearsal period and the first night, only to burst a blood vessel in a vocal cord.
Freely discussing the stigma attached to vocal problems among singers a decade later, she revealed then that things had settled down. With the children grown up, she announced that she was happily divorced, had weaned herself off steroids (thanks to the ministrations of a homeopath) and was living in what she described as “a chocolate box cottage” in the Surrey hills. It was there that she ran a festival called Coverwood Lakes Opera for more than 20 years.
She became heavily involved in charity events of various sorts, raising £86,000 for Speakability (a charity for people suffering from aphasia, now merged into the Stroke Association) in a sponsored walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End in 2001 and similar amounts in walks over London bridges for CRY (Cardiac Risk in the Young).
From 2009 to 2017 she was director of the National Opera Studio, where she significantly developed the training programme and introduced a number of initiatives, including the intensive study of core roles for singers, piano and musicianship lessons for singers, as well as singing lessons for repetiteurs.
Her marriage, in 1977, to Christopher Lane, ended in divorce in 1998. She is survived by her children, Victoria and William, and her brother, Keith.
• Kathryn Harries, singer, born 15 February 1951; died 26 May 2023
