Ode to Margreet Honig | Godmother among singing teachers

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Margreet Honig is our downstairs neighbor on Stadhouderskade. She is a singing teacher and regularly the voices of opera singers sound through the house. She is a celebrity in the opera world; if you can take lessons from Margreet, you are a privileged person. Now, at age 86, she is taking it a little easier. That is, fewer trips abroad to teach and a little less students in her home. But she continues to teach because she loves it and, she says, she still learns a lot from it.

Margreet lives in the house where she grew up. Her father was a general practitioner and her mother a housewife who also helped her husband in the practice. A headstrong child she was who had many questions about life and those questions always needed to be answered. As a young girl she was curious and she always kept that curiosity.

After high school she went to the Conservatory of Amsterdam. Soprano she was and is, but as she says, “I didn't find my own voice there. Actually, my voice got messed up there.'

There was the marriage to the pianist Rudolf Jansen. Two children: Elsina and Wouter. A divorce that was inevitable, but which gave her the feeling that she had to go her own way.

Finding your own voice became the guideline in her life. This is also the starting point in the guidance of her students. Fun in singing is the most important thing. If you don't have that, you can take so many lessons, but it's not going to work out. Singing, however, is not only a (vocal) technical matter. Your voice has a clear link to your physical and mental awareness. Only singers who are physically and emotionally strong can sing in such a way that they can sustain it and evoke emotion in the audience.

Margreet Honig is a renowned teacher in the singing world, but she is far from haughty. An air of “look how good I am,” is totally foreign to her. She does her work with dedication and pleasure. She is addicted to music and teaching. Seeing her students grow gives her great satisfaction. She has a subtle feeling for “the person behind the voice. Loving, questioning and humorous, she approaches her singers. Her students adore her and wear her on their hands. Greats from the opera world call on her for a check-up. There are those who call her “the godmother among singing teachers. She has developed a completely unique way of teaching. She passes that way on to singers and future singing teachers through the Margreet Honig Foundation. The MHF is committed to spreading her method and preserving it for the future.

Margreet behind the piano and opposite a singer or singer is a familiar image when we walk past her window. When Jan first met her about ten years ago, the first thing she said was, “You belong in this house. An apt remark and one that became true. Regularly we have dinner together. Then we share our lives, talk about the latest books we've read, about travel and recipes, about the beauty of one's own voice. A neighbor like Margreet is an enrichment of our lives.