Mr. Goodman playing a small harp
he sold, with a harp he will keep

There is more to life than playing the harp, Gerald Goodman, a retired harpist who toured as a soloist throughout the United States and abroad for 43 years, assured readers of an article that appeared in the Winter 2006 newsletter of the American Musical Instrument Society. But you would not know it from a visit to his apartment on East 79th Street in Manhattan, New York City.

Harp artifacts and ephemera of every size and description abound there, all of them meticulously catalogued in their owner's neat hand, with information on when and where they were purchased and what they cost. Mr. Goodman, who was married at one time but has no children, said that his records would be useful for estate purposes. There are more than 4,000 items listed, including those that were sold.

Now 73, Mr. Goodman retired from the concert stage in 1999. He was a regular performer at Community Concerts throughout the country, in the days when there were Community Concerts. The harp was a popular solo instrument. Mr. Goodman traveled with a black harp and often played it standing up, with a pianist accompanying him. He was a showman as well as a musician. "You have to create an image that is saleable," he says.

Mr. Goodman showing a closetful
of harp miniatures and artifacts

In retirement he has moved smoothly into other activities, still harp-related. He buys old harps at auctions or estate sales, has them rebuilt or reconditioned by the Chicago firm of Lyon & Healy, and resells them. He also takes on harp-related tasks, such as serving as adviser to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a collection of 50 harps.

Mrs. Linda Goecks, who lives on the Upper East Side in Manhattan only a few blocks from Mr. Goodman, recently acquired an Irish harp from him. It was a Christmas gift from her husband. A nonplayer who was captivated by the instrument's sound, she had always wanted to own and play one. Now she is taking lessons. "The sound is beautiful," she said.

That beauty of the sound also captivated Mr. Goodman when he was a child in Cleveland, Ohio. His mother, who was an amateur harpist, died when he was two and he inherited her Wurlitzer instrument. He studied the piano at first but then took up the harp, studying with Alice Chalifoux, then principal harpist of the Cleveland Orchestra, and also with Carlos Salzedo, whom Mr. Goodman describes as the greatest harpist in the world, the "Pagannini of the harp." Salzedo, who lived from 1885 to 1961, changed the image of the harp, according to Mr. Goodman, "from that of a gilded salon instrument to a modern instrument capable of force and precision."

"Harpo" Marx along with a politically incorrect
"Black Harpo" from Mr. Goodman's collection

After graduation from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1957, Mr. Goodman came directly to New York and soon started teaching the harp at the High School of Music and Art and Hunter College in Manhattan. In 1959 he made his Town Hall debut. His repertoire was eclectic, as it must be for most harpists. He got his first job at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home on East 81st Street, and subsequently appeared for extended engagements at the Penthouse Club and leading hotels.

He had a taste for the spotlight, and a flair for showmanship. Victor Borge, Anna Russell and Harpo Marx were his idols.

So he began to tour with a pianist, mainly either David Garvey or Jesse Nygard, playing everything from Ravel to show tunes, occasionally enduring disparaging reviews. The London Times once called him "a plastic Liberace." One of his standard stunts was to play an "Egg-slicer Sonata" on his black harp. He would insert hardboiled eggs in the strings and slice them as he played.

"It was a gimmick," Mr. Goodman says. "A concert is theater. You need to sell it."

He called his concert "Ballads and Glissandos, an Entertainment on Vertical Strings." In 1974 he performed at Wigmore Hall in London to a standing-room-only audience, and received a standing ovation, he recalled. The concert included the London premiere of "Tientos," a concert piece for harp, English horn and timpani by Carlos Surinach, a distinguished Amercan composer.

For 43 years Mr. Goodman went on three or four concert tours a year. In 1979 he rented the top-floor studio apartment where he lives. "I used to practice four to six hours a day, and I never got a complaint," he said. Since 1981, he has been on the board of the Episcopal Actors' Guild, an inter-denominational charitable organization that helps people in the theater and musicians.

A miniature Burmese harp on the
piano top with other miniatures

From an early age Mr. Goodman became an indefatigable collector of harp miniatures, replicas, postcards, and assorted ephemera. They are to be found on the shelves or walls or in the closets, boxes, albums, and cabinets of his apartment. Among them are an eighteenth-century replica of a fourteenth-century minstrel harp, probably German; a jeweled miniature of a Burmese harp in the shape of a boat; a miniature ivory Rennaissance harp from the music room of Lord Astor's Hever Castle, near London; a sixteen-inch rock crystal harp manufactured and sold by Lyon & Healy as a table accessory; and an eight-by-ten inch photograph of Salvador Dali sketching Harpo Marx playing his instrument.

On an initial visit to Mr. Goodman's apartment a visitor expressed surprise that no actual playing harp was to be seen. Mr. Goodman explained that although many harps that he is in the process of selling come in and out of the apartment, he abandoned the last instrument that he used in his performance days because it was too heavy to deal with. It weighed 96 pounds.

Some weeks later the situation had changed, however. Mr. Goodman had acquired a gold harp built in 1913 from the estate of a celebrated player, Abraham Rosen, who died last year. and intended to sell it after having it reconditioned by Lyon & Healy. He was offered $25,000 for it. But once he got it in his apartment he decided not to part with it. It has the original soundboard, and a gorgeous sound. "I've never heard anything like it," Mr. Goodman says.

Harp miniatures, not pills (he never
takes them) in the medicine chest

The harp is an ancient stringed instrument and the world has known all sorts of them, large and small, Asian and European, ancient and modern, with pedals for tuning or without. The modern concert harp typically has six and a half octaves, or 46 or 47 strings, and although the strings are plucked, the musical notation is similar to that for a piano in that the right hand plays the G-clef and the left hand the F-clef. The first four fingers of each hand (not the pinkie) are used to pluck the strings.

"The harpist must have lots of pluck, a black silk costume and a truck," the author Laurence McKinney quipped in the book People of Note. That's not entirely true. Historically, Mr. Goodman pointed out, the best-known harp soloists have been men. Besides Salzedo, he mentioned Marcel Grandjany, Nicanor Zabaleta, and Alberto Salvi. Today's harpists wheel their instrument on dollies. When they need wheels, they usually use SUV's or station wagons, not trucks.

As for Harpo Marx, although a great showman, he became a serious harpist only after 1946, when he started taking lessons from Mildred Dilling, Mr. Goodman said. In the movies, he did not actually perform on the harp. "It was done with trick photography," said Mr. Goodman. Harpo was taught how to move his hands to make it seem that he was playing. In A Night in Casablanca, for example, in which Harpo seems to be playing the harp, the respected harpist Robert Maxwell actually did the playing.

Harpo usually played a gold concert harp, one of many types offered by Lyon & Healy. Their 2007 price list offers five styles of 40- to 47-stringed pedal harps in prices ranging from $10,500 to $19,950, and six styles of special 47-stringed gold instruments starting at $59,000 and running up to $179,000 for the "Louis XV Special."

Those who are patient and willing to attune their harp aspirations to Mr. Goodman's success in making acquisitions, however, can do a lot better with a reconditioned instrument. Reconditioned harps typically cost about half as much as new harps, and sound better, according to Mr. Goodman, because the wood is older.

These days he is enthusiastic about the future of his chosen instrument. People are writing new music for the harp, he said, and some outstanding players are emerging. In particular, he is struck by the discipline the students show, and the hard work they put in. "I go to the Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music, and I'm very impressed with what I hear," Mr. Goodman said. "The new generation plays rings around the harpists of my generation."

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