Elizabeth Harwood, 52; Noted British Soprano

Elizabeth Harwood, one of Britain’s best-known operatic sopranos in the 1960s and 1970s, has died after a battle with cancer, her family said. She was 52.

The singer, who specialized in lyric and coloratura roles and the music of Mozart, died Friday at her home in Fryerning, 20 miles northeast of London.

She sang with nearly all the top British operatic companies and appeared regularly in leading roles at the prestigious annual music festival in Salzburg, Austria, in the early 1970s.

She made her operatic debut in 1960, singing Second Boy in “Die Zauberflote” at Glyndebourne in southern England.

She had been heard by Herbert von Karajan, who approached her for his own Salzburg Festival.

In 1963, she scored her first major success, as the Countess Adele in Rossini’s “Count Ory.” In 1960, she won Britain’s prized Kathleen Ferrier memorial award for singing, and in 1965 was joint winner of the Verdi Competition at Busseto in Italy.

That same year she toured Australia with Dame Joan Sutherland’s International Opera Co.

She first appeared at Salzburg in 1970, when she sang the role of Constanze in Mozart’s 1782 opera “The Abduction From the Seraglio” and that of Fiordiligi in “Cosi Fan Tutte.”

Returning to Salzburg in 1972, she sang the countess in a new production of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” again conducted by Von Karajan. He continued to invite her to Salzburg for several more years.

She repeated Constanze at Milan’s La Scala in 1972.

Von Karajan also chose her to record the title role in Franz Lehar’s “Merry Widow” and Musetta in Giacomo Puccini’s “La Boheme.”

In the late 1970s her health began to deteriorate. Her last public performance was in November, 1989, at the Bath Festival in western England.

She married publisher-businessman Julian Royle in 1966 and their home was known as a gathering place for both amateur and professional music makers. The couple had one son.