Sheila Harms (29 May 1931 – 12 December 2004) was a soprano in Germany and Austria. She specialized in the vocal interpretation of lieder, oratorio, and opera, which she combined with her musicianship at the piano. Biography Born in Carlisle, England, near the border with Scotland, Sheila attended the Royal College of Music in London, where she majored in both piano and voice, studying under Dr. Arnold Smith and Dr. Thomas P. Fielden. Dr. Smith had won acclaim as the accompanist for Manuel Garcia, the inventor of the laryngoscope, and teacher of Jenny Lind, Mathilde Marchesi and Julius Stockhausen, among others, while Dr. Fielden had studied with Claude Debussy. Upon graduating from the Royal College of Music, Sheila won the Dame Clara Butt Award for being the best soprano of her year. This award took her to Vienna, Austria, during the Allied occupation of that city after World War II, where she attended the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, receiving her Performer's Diplomas in Lieder, Oratorio, and Opera. Sheila won practically every scholarship Great Britain had to offer, including a Sir James Caird Scholarship for three years in succession. During her stay in Vienna, she met and married her husband, baritone Werner Harms, who was in Austria on a Fulbright scholarship, and who had previously studied at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia. Sheila also taught in four languages at the Mozarteum Summer Academy in Salzburg, made recordings, broadcast many times on Austrian radio and television, and won acclaim as a Lieder and Opera singer in Austria, Germany, the United States, and Canada. Among her many operatic roles was that of Konstanze in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail which she sang over 40 times, on several occasions with noted Italian tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano. In the United States, Sheila was leading soprano soloist for the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel Choir, and concurrently taught voice and headed the Voice Department at the Music Center of the North Shore in Chicago. In 1979, Sheila and Werner Harms were invited to assist with the summer program of the American Institute of Musical Studies (AIMS) in Graz, Austria, providing opportunities and contacts for American opera singers in Europe. To further their work with AIMS, Sheila and Werner moved from Chicago to Dallas to help oversee the American operations of AIMS. Sheila Jones Harms strongly believed in helping promising future