Much has been written about this great English contralto, so it’s probably OK that this appreciative American write something about her, but here, where she is not as well known, more than seventy years after her death.
Kathleen Mary Ferrier was an English contralto singer, who was very popular during WWII and after. And she was from that era when there wasn’t such a distinction made between classical music and the rest. Which is appropriate.
It’s easy to understand her appeal. Apart from her astonishing voice, she was sort of ordinary gal. She looked like all women did in the 1940s, with her neatly brushed hair, and her plain skirted suits. She was known for her somewhat ribald and raunchy sense of humor, when she wasn’t singing Mahler or Bach or the English folk songs, for which she was so well known.
The weird thing was that she didn’t set out to study music like so many do. The vocal gift took her somewhat by surprise. It was discovered relatively late that she had a great instrument within, so she dutifully began study and practice. But later than most voice students do. You could say that during the years of her great successes at performing and recording, she was learning as she went.
She was from the North of England, and talked like it, the daughter of a country schoolmaster. She quit school while a teenager to get married. She worked as a telephone operator and gave piano lessons on the side, until her great instrument within was revealed. It was her husband (the marriage, her only one, didn’t last very long, and ended in the later thirties, I think) who suggested that she try vocalizing instead of piano. He pressured her as a bet, that she enter the singing competition at the Carlisle festival. She did. She won. That was the beginning.
She became very popular in England, as might be expected. She was most popular in the 1940s. She was, as I said, learning as she went. She studied with Bruno Walter, Sir John Bartoli, and Roy Henderson, to whom she was always grateful. She did two concert trips across America and Canada. Self-managed, she made almost no money on either of them. Most voice students study languages, but by the time of her death from cancer in her early forties she knew only English (she was famous for singing English folk songs, as well as Handel and Elgar) and German (so she could sing Brahms, Mahler, and Bach). She was studying French at the time of her death. Had she been able to master that language, it would have expanded her repertoire immensely. She didn’t get the chance to study Italian. Just before she died, she was studying opera. Britten wrote his Orpheus opera with her in mind.
Her musical colleague and friend, Peter Pears, used to say that her voice, which started so beautifully in the easy part, unexpectedly, became even better in the hard part. Peter didn’t expect that. We didn’t expect that either, that what had begun so well in easiness actually got perfected in what was considered the difficult part, made surer, clearer, and even more moving there.
My favorite anecdote about her has to do with one of her recordings. She made a famous recording of Mahler’s Das Leid Von Der Erde with Bruno Walter conducting (it’s the only version I’ve been able to listen to since I heard it). She already knew she had cancer. At some point during the recording she broke down and cried. After recording the famous Abscheid, she asked Walter something like, “Did I do all right, Luv?” And Walter was utterly speechless. Yeah, she had done all right.
She died way too young, and her death took her many fans by surprise. She kept her diagnosis a secret. But she lived on for many years via the BBC, which played her a cappella version of Blow the Wind Southerly whenever they signed on or off for many years. And of course she lives on through her recordings.
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