Arthur Foxton Ferguson (3 January 1866 – 2 November 1920) an early-20th-century English baritone, lecturer, and German translator who founded The Folk-Song Quartet.
Life and education
Arthur Foxton Ferguson was born 3 January 1866 at 25 Albion Street, Leeds, Yorkshire, to Emma and William Ferguson, a bank manager. He had six siblings including William Harold Ferguson (1874–1950).
As a child, he began at Coatham and progressed to Leeds Grammar School. He then went on in 1880 to Sedbergh School whose register reports that as librarian he, "re-catalogued the library with E. L. Crawhall" (another student). Foxton Ferguson continued on to New College, Oxford in 1885 and proceeded to get an Academic Clerkship at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1887 receiving his B.A. in 1890. This is confirmed by an entry on 14 February 1887 when then Magdalen President Herbert Warren reported in his notebook that, "Arthur Foxton Ferguson, a Commoner of New College," was elected to an Academical Clerkship at Magdalen College to "sing bass." The baritone had been one of nine students competing for the post. It was very unusual to switch colleges in the day and was only permitted in special situations like his.
On 26 October 1897 he married Susanne Alexandrine Delphine Engel, the daughter of a merchant Carl Albert Engel in the Parish Church, Pinner, Middlesex. A German of Bohemian extraction from Hamburg, she was a spinster and pianist who had studied at the Hamburg Conservatory but gave up her career as a concert pianist and moved to Scarborough to live with her aunt Ida Holt. It was there she met Foxton Ferguson.
Vocal training and repertoire
Foxton Ferguson's vocal training is not well documented prior to his study in Germany but, most likely, his voice was honed in school music programs and choirs. As an Academic Clerk at Magdalen his duties included services with the esteemed organist John Varley Roberts. Foxton Ferguson's talent for solo singing became apparent in his college years at which time he appeared with the "Magdalen Vagabonds".
Ferguson's post-university musical studies took him to London and then Leipzig, though he was not enrolled at the Königliches Konservatorium der Musik zu Leipzig. Later he studied with the famous German baritone Julius Stockhausen who had founded his own school of singing in 1880. Stockhausen's diverse repertoire included opera, oratorio and, most of all, German Lieder. Foxton Ferguson's own repertoire was of a similar breadth and scope.
While he sang bass in ensembles he was called a baritone when singing as a soloist. His concert repertoire included an abundance of Lieder by Schubert and Schumann as well as folk song arrangements and original compositions by contemporary English composers. In opera Foxton Ferguson performed in such diverse repertoire as Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg though opera didn't play as large a role in his career as concerts did.
Career
Ferguson is most known for his English translations of German texts including Ottfried's Schubert Fantasies (1914); three 1903 duets based on German folk songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams, "Adieu", "Think of Me", and "Cousin Michael"; and Charles Macpherson's "The Shepherds' Cradle Song" (1912) based on "Der Hirten Wiegenlied" of Karl Neuner (1814).
Ferguson collaborated regularly with Lucy Broadwood, Ernest Walker, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Sir Henry Walford Davies. Working with Broadwood and the English Folk Dance and Song Society, of which he was a decade long member, Foxton Ferguson collected folk songs from 1905 to 1909 including "May Day Carol" (second version) from Southill, Bedfordshire which he noted from the singing of Mr Charles Baldock in 1905. The tune "Southill" was included in Vaughan Williams' 1906 edition of The English Hymnal and also Songs of Praise but without acknowledgement. He had known Broadwood as early as 1899 when he sang in a solo quartet with her at Cambridge through the University Musical Society. In 1904 she had him perform on the third series of the Broadwood family's "Ladies Concerts" in the Midland Theatre with his then regular recital partner the soprano Beatrice Spencer (1877–1961).