Pluck & Prowess
Harp virtuoso Winifred Bambrick defied her age and travelled the world.
Harp virtuoso Winifred Bambrick defied her age and travelled the world.
ON A SPRING DAY IN MARCH 1914, WINIFRED Bambrick arrived with her mother at the Edison Records studio in West Orange, New Jersey. She was the first harpist ever invited to record for the famous inventor Thomas Edison.
Edison Records stood as one of the pioneers in sound recording. The company’s Diamond Disc phonograph records represented the latest thing in audio technology, a major improvement on wax cylinders. It’s likely that Bambrick’s teacher, the renowned harpist and composer Angelo Francis Pinto, had arranged for her session. Bambrick planned to record one of his compositions, “One Sweetly Solemn Thought,” along with a second piece, “Vision,” by Gabriel Verdalle.
The young harpist played her pieces over and over again while a technician moved the recording horn a little closer, then a little further away, trying to achieve the best results. At last Edison was satisfied — so satisfied that he invited her to return in December to record two more songs.
A note in the Edison ledgers described Bambrick as a “Canadian child harpist.” In fact, although she stood only four foot eight, Bambrick was twenty-two years old.
Perhaps it was Pinto who had come up with the idea of presenting his student as a child prodigy, or perhaps Bambrick and her mother had devised the deception. Either way, in the crowded musical marketplace of New York City, a young lady needed a competitive edge, and lying about her age proved an effective strategy — one that Bambrick went on to employ time and again throughout her long musical career.
Born in Ottawa on February 21, 1892, Bambrick was by all accounts a brilliant harpist, a musician who was equally happy playing classical music or show tunes, military marches or contemporary compositions. Though her talent was prodigious, her stature was not. Years later, when asked how she managed to handle her enormous harp, she quipped: “I weigh just ninety pounds, and so does my harp. We’re well balanced.”
Bambrick’s parents were born in Canada of Irish descent. John Bambrick owned a successful grocery store in Ottawa’s Lower Town. Young Winnie Bambrick attended the Convent of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, a school boasting a strong music department, and showed an early interest in the harp. “Mother took me to a harp recital when I was eight,” she told the Ottawa Citizen in 1947, “and I made up my mind there and then to be the best harpist in the world.” As a schoolgirl, she loved to perform and was often mentioned in reviews of school concerts. She was a bright and curious child, interested in everything. As well as music, she excelled at elocution and in her final year of school won a prize for painting.
However, the harp was her great passion. In 1904, the Citizen described the twelve-year-old’s performance at a convent concert: “Special mention must be made of the harp solo by little Miss Winifred Bambrick, whose knowledge of the technique and clever fingering of the difficult string instrument was truly remarkable and would have done credit to a more mature performer.”
After high school, Bambrick continued her harp studies, likely with Aptommas, a veteran Welsh harpist who went by a single name and who spent his final years in the Canadian capital. At eighteen, in 1910, she was good enough to be engaged as the harpist in the recently organized Ottawa Symphony Orchestra, and on one occasion that year she played before Lady Zoé Laurier, the wife of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
But in Ottawa, a town of fewer than one hundred thousand people, opportunities for advanced study and performance were limited. Bambrick was hard-working and ambitious, and her mother encouraged that. Catherine Bambrick was herself musical but had never performed in public. She wanted more for her daughter. Late in the summer of 1911, Winifred Bambrick and her mother left John Bambrick and the grocery business behind and moved to New York City, where the up-and-coming harpist began intensive studies with Pinto.
Within two years, Maestro Pinto declared Bambrick ready for her debut. Her program consisted of “many works never before performed in public or having their first hearing in