The unforgettable Ferrier

On the centenary of her birth, Michael Kennedy pays homage to ‘Klever Kaff’, occasional golfer, and inventor of Rabelaisian limericks

Was she as wonderful an artist and woman as legend has it? Yes. Everything is true that has been said or written about the contralto Kathleen Ferrier, the centenary of whose birth is 22 April. She has been dead for 59 years, but through her recordings her voice — rich and always with a vein of melancholy — lives on, and could be mistaken for no one else and no one else for her. Never has a woman singer been so widely loved. The radiance of her personality suffused the music whether it was Bach or a folk song.

When she died from cancer on 8 October 1953, someone perceptively wrote that she may well have been the most celebrated woman in Britain after the Queen. The Austrian conductor Bruno Walter said, ‘The greatest thing in music in my life has been to have known Kathleen Ferrier and Gustav Mahler — in that order.’ Her international career can be charted from 17 May 1943, when she sang in Messiah with the Bach Choir in Westminster Abbey, until the night of 6 February 1953 at the Royal Opera House in the second performance of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, when during Act II a loud crack was heard. Her femur had fractured and a fragment of bone had broken away, causing agonising pain. She sang the rest of the opera motionless, leaning against the scenery.

That Abbey performance a decade earlier was significant because a large number of distinguished musicians had been in the audience to hear whether this woman from Lancashire was as good as people were saying. The BBC delegate reported that she had ‘a good voice but I cannot imagine she would ever move me’.