Ellen Formanek Tepper, of Glenside, a professional harpist, award-winning artist, dancer, and lover of dragons and kitties, died July 17 after several years of serious health challenges. She was 71.
Tepper played some of the most angelic music that I have ever heard. I saw her play with the precision of a clockmaker at the William Penn Inn in Lower Gwynedd and outdoors at Valley Green Inn during the height of the pandemic. Listeners were enthralled by her music. She even played once for the staff of the Chestnut Hill Local in our offices.
“Ellen Tepper is probably one of the most accomplished players of the Celtic Harp in the Northeastern U.S,” Mike Agranoff, of The Folk Project, New Jersey's premier acoustic music and dance organization, has said.
In a 2019 interview, Tepper told us that, even as a little girl, she wanted to play the harp. “My parents asked me when I was just 5 what instrument I wanted to play, and I just knew it was the harp,” she said. “I was good with my fingers, and I wanted that sound to be my voice. We listened to lots of classical music at home, and we had a record of Mother Goose rhymes with a small ensemble which featured the harp. I memorized the whole album.
“However, we lived way out on Long Island, and trips to New York City for harp lessons would have taken all day. It took moving to Vienna, Austria, to start,” she continued. “At home, I practiced on a harp loaned to me by Professor Jelinek, my first teacher, 45 minutes of scales after dinner every day. I was very shy. I was called 'Die Kleine,' the little one.”
Tepper's mother was a psychologist, and her father was the principal of a school in Smithtown, Long Island. He then got a job as director of the American International School in Vienna, Austria. Ellen was just seven in 1960 when the family moved to Austria, where they stayed for four years before moving to New York City. In Vienna, she took a year of piano lessons and then harp studies at the Vienna Music Academy, where she was the youngest student at age 8.
“We were able to meet my mother's nanny in Paris and her cousins, who had escaped to Sweden during the war,” Tepper said. “We also went to what is now Slovakia and found relatives on my father's side. We were taken to concerts, operas and museums and dragged through Roman ruins.”
After returning to the U.S., Tepper went to the Philadelphia College of Art for a year but also commuted to New York for harp lessons. “I have always been torn between making music and art,” she said, “and I realized that I needed more guidance in music and could continue art on my own terms.”
Tepper enrolled at Philadelphia Musical Academy, later merging to ultimately become the University of the Arts, which recently closed its doors. She graduated in 1978 with a degree in harp performance. Her teacher, Margarita Csonka Montanaro, Tepper described as “an absolutely magnificent teacher and also originally from Austria.”
After graduation, Tepper studied for a short time at Drexel's School of Library Science and had a job running the library at the Settlement Music School in South Philadelphia for three years. She also worked as a baker at a natural foods restaurant and played harp gigs, “though still struggling with stage fright.” She took time off to raise three children, after which “my first job was the story hour at the local library with my own 2-year-old in my lap.”
Tepper also played for Music for All Seasons, a nonprofit that sent her to play for shut-ins, mostly women's shelters, and she was involved with Voices for Children, which works with children in foster care. In addition to her frequent work at the William Penn Inn, Tepper played for hundreds of weddings and funerals in the area over many decades. She also gave private lessons for more than 30 years.
“The most difficult performances are playing through grief,” she said. “I played for my best friend's funeral in 1979. It was so hard, but I could not speak. I played Debussy's 'First Arabesque.' I don't know how I did that. I also had a gig the day after my second husband's suicide. I had trouble accessing my memorized material.”
Also a talented artist, Tepper won the Award for Excellence at the Abigail Adams Smith Museum (now the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum) in New York at an Embroiderers' Guild biennial show for her piece, “The Renaissance Woman.”
Donna Mutchler, a fan of Tepper's playing, wrote online: “Ellen was such a lovely woman. Her talent on harp was exquisite, and her waltz sessions were pure elegance. I feel honored to have waltzed to her playing over many years.”
The public is invited to a memorial session on Sept. 12, 7 to 9 p.m., at the Irish Center (Commodore Barry Club) in Mt. Airy that Ellen used to lead with Terry Kane. Sing, play an instrument, tell a joke or dance. There will also be some of Ellen's art on display.
Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.
