Eileen Farrell at her Most Visceral

Cover of the original Columbia vinyl release of Wozzeck (from its Amazon.com Web page)

Tomorrow (February 13) will mark the 100th birthday of soprano Eileen Farrell. Sony Classical has honored this occasion by releasing a sixteen-CD box set of all of her American Columbia recording sessions. Taking place between 1946 and 1963, these covered a considerable breadth of repertoire, going back as early as Christoph Willibald Gluck and extending into the pop repertoire of her day. From my personal point of view, the first two CDs in the collection are the most historically significant. These provide a concert recording of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos in April of 1951.

Unless I am mistaken, this is the earliest recording made of the opera in its entirety. (This was not the first time the opera had been performed in the United States. The Philadelphia Grand Opera Company staged the American premiere on March 19, 1931, conducted by Leopold Stokowski.) Serious scholars have never been kind to the Mitropoulos recording, but in my student days it was the only one available. Those in search of greater fidelity of interpretation would have to wait over a decade before recordings became available of conductors such as Karl Böhm and Pierre Boulez. Where performances were concerned, the Metropolitan Opera fared particularly well under the baton of James Levine.

When compared with all the other recordings that Farrell made, it is easy to conjecture that the complexity of Berg’s vocal lines were not in her comfort zone. Nevertheless, I would still be willing to say that she gave the role of Marie much more than a “good college try.” For that matter, she seems to have been well aware that one could not portray Marie without a solid foundation of acting chops. On this recording there are moments in which tone of voice takes precedence over any secure sense of pitch, and at those moments Farrell’s voice can scare the pants off anyone with even a rough idea of the libretto’s narrative.

It is also worth noting that the CD jackets have reproduced the rich resources of background material (including the synopsis of the opera) that had appeared on the original LP albums. There is much to be gained from reading all of this content, even if the act of reading demands a strong magnifying glass. Fortunately, the track listening in the accompanying booklet provides the structural outline of Berg’s score, which is as impressive as the music itself.

As to the remainder of the entire collection, my current plan is to cover it in two parts. The first will account for the remaining nine recordings from the classical genre. I am not yet quite sure how I shall deal with the remaining five recordings on the pop side, but I do not intend to ignore them entirely!