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Can't Help Singing: The Life Of Eileen FarrellEditions
Review
Farrell was a big girl with a big voice and her greatest achievements on record (vinyl in those days) were as Marie in Berg’s opera “Wozzeck” and her album “I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues”. She began her professional career after the usual church choir bit, on national US radio in 1940 singing everything from “Home Sweet Home” to the Liebstod from Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” in a milieu crammed with fascinating European musicians like Erich Korngold and Bernard Hermann (who went on to write the score for Hitchcock’s “Psycho”), as well as the era’s greatest popular stars such as Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee. It was from such masters as Harold Arlen and the legendary Mabel Mercer that she learned to handle a lyric whether singing “Stormy Weather” or Strauss’s “Four Last Songs”. When TV began to make its mark, Eileen was not deemed appropriate for the new medium, and she hit the road and with her luscious voice giving concerts of an extraordinary range of the dramatic soprano’s repertoire with some of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. Of course, one of the main reasons for reading any diva’s memoirs is to get the dish on the high and mighty in the rarefied atmosphere of the Opera world and with her earthy turn of phrase and short fuse, Farrell certainly delivers her full quota, tempered however by a nice line in self-deprecating humour. Interestingly for a devout Roman Catholic with fervent Republican views, her most important musical relationships were with three homosexual conductors, the closeted Dmitri Mitropoulos, the handsome but private Thomas Schippers and the flamboyant Lenny Bernstein who was “the musical love of my life”. The opera world finally ensnared her in a triumphant “Alceste” in 1960, but her heart was more set on a stable family life with her policeman husband and in tandem with some of the most demanding roles in the classical rep. she brought out a series of best selling albums of standards, blues and jazz which kept her name in front of an adoring public. Farrell never reconciled herself to life as a diva, preferring the more overt friendliness of showbusiness as this spicy and entertaining memoir shows us, where Callas and Toscanini mingle with Ethel Merman and Carol Burnett. - review by Stewart Grimshaw |
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John Sandoe [Books] Ltd |
Montserrat Caballe only did it once, Dame Kiri can’t do it at all, bless her, and there should be a law against the three tenors doing it in public! But Eileen Farrell did it again and again. The elusive ability which tempts the opera singer to abandon the heights of Parnassus and get down and groove to Cole Porter or Lloyd-Webber, usually to cringe-making effect.
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