Updated June 16, 2026 at 11:25 AM EDT
Chico was the Italian-ish, piano-playing con artist, Groucho was the thickly mustachioed wisecracker and Harpo the gentle soul who never spoke a word. And with that trio, the Marx Brothers conquered vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century.
Harpo can now be heard speaking in character in a recently found recording taped just six months before he died in 1964.
Marx Brothers historian Robert S. Bader noted this was the only time Harpo performed in character and allowed it to be recorded.
Harpo Speaks! finds the usually silent clown chatting with — and playing his beloved harp for — an audience during a fundraiser for the Riverside Symphony Orchestra in California.
"Believe it or not… I'm gonna talk!" he says to gasps from the audience heard in the recording released this month.
The brilliant mime and self-taught musician also narrates Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and plays a few harp arrangements.
"I did not hear Harpo. I heard my dad," Bill Marx, a composer and pianist now in his late 80s, said about the recording. "I just heard his voice as I would hear him at the breakfast table. He was very soft spoken and certainly one of the easiest people in the world to know and love. "
The recording was found in response to inquiries for another tape from John Tefteller, who worked as an audio engineer and archivist for Groucho Marx. He collects rare Marx Brothers recordings.
In a mislabeled box in the archives of Robert Sherman, who had recorded the concert but had forgotten about it, was the recording.
"The tape was in reasonable condition, except it was unprofessionally recorded," Bader said. "But extensive restoration was done on the tape and the problems were corrected. And we have the absolutely beautiful recording of Harpo's final performance."
Groucho and Harpo tweaked the libretto of Peter and the Wolf to introduce a bit of political humor as the 1964 presidential primaries were getting in full swing.
The triumphant procession led by young Peter after the hunters capture the wolf here includes Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller — the three leading Republican presidential candidates at the time. The audience roars with laughter in response.
"That's a piece of it that's pure Groucho," said Bader. "The duck surviving [after being swallowed by the wolf] is pure Harpo. It's a real good collaboration because you get a little taste of both of them in it."
Harpo had mostly limited his character appearances to television after the Marx Brothers' 13th and final feature film, Love Happy, in 1949. After suffering heart attacks in 1961, his doctors told him to completely stop working. But he still participated in benefit shows, as Arthur Marx the person, not Harpo the character.
"He retired 43 times and had to come out of retirement all those times," Bill Marx said. "It was so ingrained in him that he had to continue doing what he loved doing, and he never lost sight of probably the most important part of his life, and that was music."
Bill Marx arranged the pieces his father played in albums under the Mercury Records label in the 1950s. He was also the arranger for "Moon Medley" – which combines tunes from "Fly Me to the Moon" and "How High the Moon" – which Harpo performs in the recording, alongside his composition "Guardian Angels."
He was a lifelong learner, despite being unschooled, his son said.
"Dad had to learn how to do things... And he had curiosity about everything from music to painting to writing to golf," Bill Marx added. "And without any education whatsoever, he captured all of those things."
Arthur Marx's childlike innocence and the twinkle in his eye were critical components of the character he created in Harpo.
"He learned as he went," the younger Marx said. "It was a special quality about him that I wish I had in my lifetime."
Barry Gordemer oversaw production of the broadcast version of this story. Majd Al-Waheidi edited the digital version.
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