Eileen Farrell sings Wagner | Testament SBT1415

Eileen Farrell sings Wagner

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Label: Testament

Cat No: SBT1415

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Release Date: 30th June 2008

Contents

Works

Wagner
Wesendonck Lieder

Wagner
Siegfried, Act III scene 3

Artists

Eileen Farrell
Set Svanholm
Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra
Stokowski’s Symphony Orchestra

Conductors

Erich Leinsdorf
Leopold Stokowski

Works

Wagner
Wesendonck Lieder

Wagner
Siegfried, Act III scene 3

Artists

Eileen Farrell
Set Svanholm
Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra
Stokowski’s Symphony Orchestra

Conductors

Erich Leinsdorf
Leopold Stokowski

About

Such anomalies have been known, but it is hard to think of one more glaring than this: that a Wagnerian soprano who might well rank among the finest of her century never sang a Wagnerian role on stage. There was no physical disability. Like many others she was of generous build, but she was quite personable and able-bodied and appeared in other roles, such as the Leonoras of both Il trovatore and La forza del destino, where the dramatic conflict and subsequent catastrophe are scarcely credible without some physical attractiveness being there for all to see in the heroine. A reasonably well-informed listener to this present recital who happened to come upon Eileen Farrell’s voice for the first time might be expected to think along these lines: “I’ve obviously missed something. Let’s see. Born 1920, 30 in 1950, and American. With such a voice she must by then have made her début at the Met. Perhaps with Melchior in his last seasons. Sounds as though she would have been a great Isolde. Covent Garden presumably? And Bayreuth? Did she sing Kundry for Knappertsbusch? The Ring under Furtwängler, or Karajan perhaps?”.

The answers, sadly, are all negative. There was no Kundry or Brünnhilde, Bayreuth or Covent Garden. America’s national opera house never heard her in Melchior’s time and when it did it was in Gluck, Weber, Verdi, Ponchielli, Mascagni and Giordano: no Wagner. Various explanations have been offered, including the antipathy of Rudolf Bing, General Manager of the Metropolitan at the time, to both Wagner and Farrell. She herself told an interviewer many years later that she would have liked to sing Isolde but was never asked. The truth is more likely to be, as she states in her autobiography, Can’t Help Singing (Boston, 1999): “I kept getting pushed to do Wagner roles on stage, but I wasn’t interested. Doing Wagner excerpts in concerts was as far down that road as I wanted to go; building a career round Wagner had killed off too many sopranos.” She added that she regarded her voice as “too schmaltzy for Wagner”, and that anyway now that Birgit Nilsson had come along she was “happy to leave Wagner territory to her”.

Extract from the booklet note © John Steane, 2008

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