Musician turned radio host Debra Lew Harder heard by millions of Metropolitan Opera fans

Her voice is calm, poised and knowledgeable.

On Saturdays, during the performing season of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, her voice explains, explicates and enthuses over opera for an untold number of listeners.

The voice belongs to Debra Lew Harder, who, since the fall of 2021, has been the host on live radio broadcasts of productions at the Met.

Harder — a 62-year-old native of Burlington, Vermont, who was raised and educated in northeastern Ohio — is now part of an elite group of broadcasters: Since the Met began transmitting broadcasts of its performances over the radio in 1931, just four other people have hosted them: Milton Cross, Peter Allen, Margaret Juntwait and most recently, Mary Jo Heath.

“Debra was the obvious choice,” said Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb. “She has a wonderful speaking voice, which is obviously part of it. She is also a very thoughtful interviewer of guests … She is very insightful in her commentary.”

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Harder brings considerable musical experience to her job: Prior to entering the world of radio, she was an accomplished pianist who studied at Ohio State University in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

“I’ve always enjoyed words and music, and being able to communicate,” said Harder, who makes her home in Philadelphia. “I discovered that talking about music was deeply rewarding, as well as playing it.”

She has won praise from listeners on both counts.

“She was a very fine musician,” said WOSU on-air host Christopher Purdy, who attended concerts given by Harder when she was in Columbus and now listens to her Met broadcasts.

“I admire anybody who can do that job with such smoothness and aplomb, and that’s what I’ve heard her do,” Purdy said.

From medicine to music

The oldest of four children born to South Korean parents, Harder was raised in Barberton, where she took advantage of the area’s vibrant classical music scene.

“That was a fantastic training ground for classical music with the Cleveland Orchestra, and I attended a wonderful music camp,” said Harder, who also took piano lessons and won competitions but was urged by her parents to pursue a practical course.

“I took a detour into medicine,” said Harder, whose father is a retired anesthesiologist. “My parents, being quite wise, said, ‘Well, you’ve got to follow a career path where you can actually earn a living.’”

Harder studied medicine at what was then the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, from which she received a medical degree in 1985. She practiced emergency medicine for several years in central Ohio. By then, she was married to her husband, Thomas, but was still yearning to return to music.

“My husband’s father also is a wonderful amateur musician and said, ‘You can only choose a couple of things in life,’” said Harder, who has two grown children, Alysa and Alexandra, with her husband (also a physician).

In 1988, Harder entered Ohio State University to study with noted pianist Earl Wild, then an artist in residence at the university.

“I remember having the audition over there in the music building at Ohio State,” she said. “There was a committee of people and he just pointed at me and said, ‘I will take her.’ It was great.”

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Her parents were a bit “bewildered,” she said, by her career detour.

“It took my parents a long time to accept that I made that change, but I think they gradually came to accept it, especially my dad,” said Harder, whose father is a music lover with a tenor voice.

“My father has always loved opera and he’s just thrilled that I’m at the Met,” she said.

Harder received a doctor of musical arts (DMA) degree from Ohio State in 1994.

The road to radio

Harder and her family eventually settled in Philadelphia. She continued to perform solo and as part of small ensembles, but she had become increasingly accustomed to discussing the music she was making; she taught at Haverford College.

When she learned that classical music radio host Jill Pasternak, a longtime presence at WRTI in Philadelphia, was retiring, Harder seized the opportunity.

“All the other hosts were male,” Harder said. “Radio is an auditory medium, so they needed a female voice. I went and auditioned, and I actually had to learn how to work the console, the mics, all the mechanics of hosting a radio show and engineering it.”

Harder, who began broadcasting on WRTI in 2016, says that her performance experience comes in handy when sitting in the broadcast booth.

“I think one of the skills I brought from being a pianist was not cracking under pressure,” said Harder, who developed a following at the station in Philadelphia.

“I had a wonderful Saturday morning program that I curated called ‘Saturday Morning Classical Coffee House,’ where I mixed lots of different kinds of classical music from very contemporary to early music,” she said.

The new voice of the Met

Then, two years ago, Harder learned of the departure of Met radio host Mary Jo Heath. “I just threw my hat in the ring,” she said.

When Met officials heard her, they knew they had found the fifth voice of the Met. “I asked the media team here at the Met to present candidates, and Debra was the first choice,” Gelb said.

Before a broadcast, Harder familiarizes herself with the score to each opera she will host over the air; she discusses with producers how a given opera’s story will be relayed to listeners.

The broadcast booth is on the sixth floor of the Metropolitan Opera House, where Harder and commentator Ira Siff talk and conduct interviews with artists at intermission. “We also have a monitor for the conductor,” Harder said. “When they give the down beat, everything has to be timed so that we are done talking by the time the music starts.”

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Harder’s debut on Met airwaves came in September 2021, when the opera company performed “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” by Terence Blanchard.

“It was the first opera by a Black composer ever to be done at the Met,” said Harder, who describes herself as too busy to be nervous during the broadcast on the Met’s channel on SiriusXM. (Its regular broadcasts to radio stations, including WOSU, begin each year in December.)

“There are a lot of moving parts and not really enough time to sit and think, ‘Oh my God, I’m going out to millions of people,’” she said.

But she is.

“These broadcasts are not just heard in the United States but all over the world,” Gelb said. “They’re broadcast live in Canada, and they’re distributed live by the European Broadcasting Union. And a number of leading broadcasters, including the BBC, carry most if not all of them live. The Met, as the performing arts company with the single largest audience reach in the world, depends upon these broadcasts.”

Even though her voice travels internationally, Harder still calls herself a Buckeye.

“I really was raised in Ohio,” she said. “I think of myself as basically an Ohioan.”

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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Debra Lew Harder hosts live radio broadcasts of Metropolitan Opera