Marion Elizabeth (Auld) Metcalfe died peacefully on the afternoon of Monday, August 11, at her apartment in Cincinnati, Ohio, surrounded by her two children and two granddaughters. She was 89 years old.
Liz was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, the oldest of the four daughters of Maude and William Auld. She began to play the piano at a young age, taught at first by her mother, and her precocious talent soon bloomed. She won awards and competitions, played a concerto with the Toronto Symphony at age 12, and received an Artist’s Diploma from the Royal Conservatory of Music as a teenager. She then attended Victoria College of the University of Toronto, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English and French in 1958. While at Vic she met Bill Metcalfe — Liz was the pianist for productions of Gilbert and Sullivan; Bill, the conductor — and the two formed a lifelong partnership of love and music. They were married just before graduation and soon set off for Minneapolis, where Bill studied for a doctorate in history. In 1963 the couple moved to Burlington, Vt., where Liz in due course joined Bill on the faculty of the University of Vermont, Liz in the Music Department. She also gave private piano lessons to generations of children and was a devoted and endlessly supportive teacher for students of any age.
Liz was a cofounder of the University of Vermont Baroque Ensemble, with which she played harpsichord, and a longtime member of the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble. She concertized for 30 years with the New York Chamber Soloists and played with them on memorable tours in South America, France, Spain, and the American Southwest and Pacific Coast; appeared with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra as both soloist and orchestral musician; and performed frequently in the Vermont Mozart Festival, which Bill cofounded and often conducted. The two also collaborated for 35 years to run the Oriana Singers and pursued their youthful delight in G&S with the Gilbert and Sullivan Singers of Vermont. Liz was elected a fellow of the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and in 2015, together with Bill, was awarded the Walter Cerf Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, presented by the governor of Vermont and the Vermont Arts Council, in recognition of their many contributions to the artistic life of their beloved adopted home state.
Sunny and generous, gracious and cheerful, kind and ever ready with a beaming smile, Liz was a wonderful, loving mother and grandmother. She and Bill shared a love of travel — hers perhaps encouraged by a trip to New York City taken with her younger sister Jan around the age of 20, quite an adventure for a rather sheltered pair of young women at that time! — and they loved hosting and attending dinner parties — many shared with a group of friends dubbed the Wine Octet. Liz eventually became an American citizen but remained a proud Canadian her whole life. She was especially attached to the small town of Kincardine, Ontario, where the Auld family acquired a cottage on the shores of Lake Huron in the 1940s and where she spent many blissful summers playing on the beach, watching the horses run on the racetrack behind the cottage, and listening to Scottish pipe and drum bands on Saturday evenings.
After living in Vermont for 60 years, Liz moved to Cincinnati in January 2023 to be near her daughter and her family. She was preceded in passing by her husband, Bill, and her three younger sisters, Jan, Cathy and Susie. She is survived by her son, Scott Metcalfe, his wife, Emily Walhout, and their daughter, Anna Metcalfe; her daughter, Susan Speno, Sue’s husband, Andrew Speno, their children, Erin and Benjamin, and Erin’s husband, Brandon Stout; and her brother-in-law, Jack Hansen, his children, Joshua Hansen and Emily Smith, and their families.