
Margit-Anna Süß

Margit-Anna Süss, born in Munich, was surrounded by music from her earliest childhood. She was born at a time when the fog of incessant sound that is ubiquitous nowadays still lay in the future and there was enough peace and quiet in everyday life to fill it with song and instrumental playing. She grew up in a family for which making music together was a natural and integral part of life.
She began to learn the harp at age nine at the Richard Strauss Conservatoire, where her teacher at the time, Ragnhild Kopp, recognised her pupil’s exceptional talent when she wrote her first little composition. After a thorough grounding Margit-Anna Süss went to study with Ursula Lentrodt at the Munich Musikhochschule and successfully completed three master-classes. When aged 20 she went to Hamburg to be auditioned, purely out of interest, and was immediately offered the position of principal harpist in the NDR Symphony Orchestra. At the same time she was chosen by the Deutscher Musikrat (the German music council) as one of a select group of young soloists, which led to involvement in many recitals.
German academic organisations for the support of students enabled her by means of grants to study for two years with the legendary French harpist Pierre Jamet (1893-1991), who in his youth had worked with Maurice Ravel and particularly with Claude Debussy. He was the first harpist to perform this composer’s works on the double pedal harp instead of the originally intended chromatic harp and to make musical arrangements of them with the help of his personal contacts. For Margit-Anna Süss, the time in Paris was, as she herself said, of crucial importance. The worlds that the elderly composer opened up to her proved to be her natural home, and from then on her career took a new direction in which orchestral duties, chamber music and other performing commitments combined harmoniously with her busy travelling schedule.
Early years
She began to learn the harp at age nine at the Richard Strauss Conservatoire, where her teacher at the time, Ragnhild Kopp, recognised her pupil’s exceptional talent when she wrote her first little composition. After a thorough grounding Margit-Anna Süss went to study with Ursula Lentrodt at the Munich Musikhochschule and successfully completed three master-classes. When aged 20 she went to Hamburg to be auditioned, purely out of interest, and was immediately offered the position of principal harpist in the NDR Symphony Orchestra. At the same time she was chosen by the Deutscher Musikrat (the German music council) as one of a select group of young soloists, which led to involvement in many recitals.
... and off to Paris!
German academic organisations for the support of students enabled her by means of grants to study for two years with the legendary French harpist Pierre Jamet (1893-1991), who in his youth had worked with Maurice Ravel and particularly with Claude Debussy. He was the first harpist to perform this composer’s works on the double pedal harp instead of the originally intended chromatic harp and to make musical arrangements of them with the help of his personal contacts. For Margit-Anna Süss, the time in Paris was, as she herself said, of crucial importance. The worlds that the elderly composer opened up to her proved to be her natural home, and from then on her career took a new direction in which orchestral duties, chamber music and other performing commitments combined harmoniously with her busy travelling schedule.
In the orchestra
While still in Paris, Margit-Anna Süss was invited to join a tour of South East Asia with Horst Stein and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. This resulted in her joining the ranks of that orchestra as a guest performer for several years and she was also invited into a number of other bands. Under Herbert von Karajan she became a reserve member of the Berlin Philharmonic for over ten years. This continued under Claudio Abbado and Sir Simon Rattle and included over two decades of appearances at the Salzburg Easter Festival.
In the concert hall
All this still left time for tours of Europe and journeys to Japan, South America and the USA. Margit-Anna Süß has performed solo in many venues including the Salzburg Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Rheingau, and the Jerusalem Festival, as well as world harp congresses in Maastricht, Strasbourg and Prague. She was invited to perform solo with the Berlin Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado, the Orchestre Nationale de Lyon under Emanuel Krivine, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra under David Shallon, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Prague Chamber Orchestra, the Heilbronn Chamber Orchestra, the Orquestra Sinfonica de Tenerife, the NDR Radiophilharmonie Hannover, and many more.
Chamber music
In a chamber music context she has appeared with many players including the flautists András Adorján, James Galway, Stephanie Hamburger, Emmanuel Pahud and Wolfgang Schulz, the oboists Albrecht Mayer and Hansjörg Schellenberger and the double-bass player Klaus Stoll, as well as with the Jerusalem Quartet, the Haydn Ensemble Berlin and the Ensemble Wien-Berlin.
Ensemble Wien-Berlin
The mention of this ensemble centred in Vienna and Berlin takes us directly to her discography, which consists of productions with various labels (Deutsche Grammophon, Sony Classical, Denon and Campanella Musica) and includes an exceptionally broad repertoire ranging from the music of the Versailles court to the most recent past. These issues have received some very complimentary national and international reviews; special mention can be made of the DG recording of French chamber music, which comes across as the quintessence of the many hours in which Pierre Janet’s pupil learned how to play the harp in the style or manner of the Impressionists. Here the actress Catherine Deneuve and the six-strong Ensemble Wien-Berlin can be heard with Margit-Anna Süß performing Debussy’s beautiful Chanson de Bilitis along with his late Trio Sonata and Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro. This musical gem was awarded a Grand Prix du Disque.
Campanella Musica
The Campanella CD of concertos for harp, oboe and chamber orchestra by Witold Lutosławski und Frank Martin was also much praised. The interpretation by this husband and wife team of Margit-Anna Süß and Hansjörg Schellenberger with Budapest’s Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra under Zoltán Peskó was included on the quarterly list of the German Record Prize in 1999.
The teacher
Very recently Margit-Anna Süß has attracted a great deal of attention with a further unusual solo album: the recording on the harp of the complete Impromptus by Schubert, in their original piano versions. This rendering is not only successful from a purely musical point of view: it also perfectly demonstrates the so-called “Zwischendämpfung” (intermediate damping or string stopping) by means of which the artist can achieve an exceptional clarity and reproduce these piano pieces in an authentic manner. She never tires of introducing this to the participants in her international masterclasses such as those at the Sibelius Academy Helsinki, the St Petersburg Conservatoire, the Royal Northern College of Music Manchester and the University of Tokyo. Since the winter term 2015 Margit-Anna Süß has been teaching at the Kunstuniversität Graz, where her status as a visiting professor was changed to a permanent professorship in 2017.



Photographer: Bonifaz Weiss