Ware was best known for performing and composing violin music with Hungarian and Slavic themes.[3][4][5] She played the "Old Adam" violin, an instrument once owned by a German concertmeister, Franz Adam.[6] She also played a
Stradivarius violin, the "Mr. Soames Strad".[7][8][9] She toured in the United States in the 1910s,[10] sometimes including her own compositions in the program.[11] Ware made several recordings in 1914, 1915, and 1916, some of them with pianist Francis Moore, for the
Victor and
Edison companies.[12] She had a summer home, "Fiddler's Camp", in
Arden, Delaware.[7]
Ware toured and performed steadily through the 1920s and 1930s,[13][14] and formed a chamber trio with two other women, cellist Margaret Day and pianist Eugenia Cerniafskaya.[15] In 1948, after her second husband died, she briefly took over his work as tour director of the
United States Marine Band.[16] In the 1950s she gave performances mostly near her home in Delaware.[17][18]
Helen Ware joined the Communist Labor Party of America when her mother founded the party, in 1919. She was sometimes confused with actress
Helen Ware, or composer
Harriet Ware.[19][20]
Helen Ware with her first husband, Laszlo Schwartz, and their children
Ware married twice. Her first husband was her manager, Hungarian-born violinist Laszlo Schwartz;[23] they married in 1912, and had a son[24] and daughter. Her second husband was Clarence C. Cappel, tour director of the United States Marine Band; they married in 1923, and had three children, Andor, Helen[25] and Edward (Dan);[26] Cappel died in 1948,[27][28] and Helen Ware Cappel died on September 3, 1974, aged 86, in
Keene, New Hampshire.[29] Her daughter with Schwartz was actress
Herta Ware,[30] and her grandchildren include actress
Ellen Geer. Actress
Willow Geer is her great-grandchild.