Writing the history of a music agency (Ibbs and Tillett. The Rise and Fall of a Musical Empire, 2005), I came across correspondence between the firm and one of its sole artists, the singer Kathleen Ferrier, much of it hitherto unpublished. The letters peel away the layers of a musician's life and career in England during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. What might appear on the surface to be nothing more than the mundane workings of such a firm (including negotiations, bookings, programmes, contracts, availability and fees), in fact reveal not only efficiency but also the far-sightedness, sensitivity, tact and business acumen required in the three-way flow between agent, artist and client. In the artistic world where tempers can easily fray, Kathleen's temperament and sense of humour produced plenty of light-hearted moments. Her personality was a mixture of extreme modesty and self-determined ambition, and of selflessness and stubbornness. On the one hand she could not believe her luck to have come so far so soon, ‘from Carlisle to Covent Garden in five years’, on the other she knew exactly where she stood in the music profession both nationally and internationally, and would not be deflected into musical territory in which she knew her voice and her persona would neither fit nor stand scrutiny. Her life was brief, far too brief, and the end was cruelly tragic, but it was only in the last year that she began to lose heart when others had given up hope long before. She must have been fun to know and, from these surviving letters and diaries, what emerges is a sunny picture in a gloomy landscape. It is hard to describe her voice, for ‘a voice is a person’ according to tenor Peter Pears, and how right he was. Nevertheless some images do come near to describing her voice, the touch of plush velvet, the colour of a rich claret, or the unbroken column of milk poured into the corner of a bar of well-known chocolate seen on advertising hoardings – a creamy picture depicting a creamy sound.