Queer Places:
33 Blackburn Rd, Higher Walton, Preston PR5 4DX, UK
Golders Green Crematorium
Golders Green, London Borough of Barnet, Greater London, England
Kathleen Mary Ferrier, CBE (22 April 1912 – 8 October 1953)[1] was an English contralto singer who achieved an international reputation as a stage, concert and recording artist, with a repertoire extending from folksong and popular ballads to the classical works of Bach, Brahms, Mahler and Elgar. Her death from cancer, at the height of her fame, was a shock to the musical world and particularly to the general public, which was kept in ignorance of the nature of her illness until after her death.
The daughter of a Lancashire village schoolmaster, Ferrier showed early talent as a pianist, and won numerous amateur piano competitions while working as a telephonist with the General Post Office.
Leading singers such as Mary Garden,
Emma Calve,
Geraldine Farrar,
and Kathleen Ferrier became cultural icons to lesbian opera fans.
The American lesbian novelist Willa Cather, a devotee of opera,
wrote The Song of the Lark (19IS), a fictionalized biography of the Wagnerian
soprano Olive Fremstad.
Ferrier met Albert Wilson in 1933, probably through dancing, which they both loved. When she announced that they were to marry, her family and friends had strong reservations, on the grounds that she was young and inexperienced, and that she and Wilson shared few serious interests.[9] Nevertheless, the marriage took place on 19 November 1935. Shortly afterwards the couple moved to Silloth, a small port town in Cumberland, where Wilson had been appointed as manager of his bank's branch. The marriage was not successful; the honeymoon had revealed problems of physical incompatibility, and the union remained unconsummated.[15] Outward appearances were maintained for a few years, until Wilson's departure for military service in 1940 effectively ended the marriage. The couple divorced in 1947, though they remained on good terms. Wilson subsequently married a friend of Ferrier's, Wyn Hetherington; he died in 1969.[16]
Ferrier did not take up singing seriously until 1937, when after winning a prestigious singing competition at the Carlisle Festival she began to receive offers of professional engagements as a vocalist. Thereafter she took singing lessons, first with J.E. Hutchinson and later with Roy Henderson. After the outbreak of the Second World War Ferrier was recruited by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), and in the following years sang at concerts and recitals throughout the UK. In 1942 her career was boosted when she met the conductor Malcolm Sargent, who recommended her to the influential Ibbs and Tillett concert management agency. She became a regular performer at leading London and provincial venues, and made numerous BBC radio broadcasts.
In 1946, Ferrier made her stage debut, in the Glyndebourne Festival premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera The Rape of Lucretia. A year later she made her first appearance as Orfeo in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, a work with which she became particularly associated. By her own choice, these were her only two operatic roles. As her reputation grew, Ferrier formed close working relationships with major musical figures, including Britten, Sir John Barbirolli, Bruno Walter and the accompanist Gerald Moore. She became known internationally through her three tours to the United States between 1948 and 1950 and her many visits to continental Europe.
Ferrier was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 1951. In between periods of hospitalisation and convalescence she continued to perform and record; her final public appearance was as Orfeo, at the Royal Opera House in February 1953, eight months before her death. She died at University College Hospital on 8 October 1953, aged 41; the date for which, while still hopeful of recovery, she had undertaken to sing Frederick Delius's A Mass of Life at the 1953 Leeds Festival.[105] Ferrier was cremated a few days later, at Golders Green Crematorium, after a short private service.[106] She left an estate worth £15,134, which her biographer Maurice Leonard observes was "not a fortune for a world-famous singer, even by the standards of the day".[107][n 6]
Among her many memorials, the Kathleen Ferrier Cancer Research Fund was launched in May 1954. The Kathleen Ferrier Scholarship Fund, administered by the Royal Philharmonic Society, has since 1956 made annual awards to aspiring young professional singers.
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