Eileen Farrell: Advent Calendar of Song: Day Three
Some of you are longing for one of the controversial numbers I've promised. Will any of you object to this one? I hope not. It's that Cole Porter classic "In the Still of the Night", written in 1937 for the film "Rosalie" where it's sung by Nelson Eddy, but, as far as I can tell from research, it was already being recorded by others by the time the film was out.
In the still of the night,
As I gaze from my window
At the moon in its flight,
My thoughts all stray to you.
In the still of the night,
While the world is in slumber,
Oh the times without number,
Darling, when I say to you
Do you love me
As I love you?
Are you my life to be,
My dream come true?
Or will this dream of mine
Fade out of sight?
Like the moon growing dim
On the rim of the hill
In the chill, still of the night.
(Nelson Eddy recorded a version where the words and music change at the end. I've never seen "Rosalie", where he is billed above Eleanor Powell, but I ill, I will) Most of us know "In the Still of the Night" best with Ella Fitzgerald's Cole Porter Songbook recording; I have no quarrel with that.
But here is Eileen Farrell (1920-2002), the American operatic singer famous as the greatest exponent of crossover ( a word she utterly rejected and refused to comprehend). She sang in Beethoven's Choral Symphony with Toscanini, she sang Wagner with Stokowki, she recorded Gluck's Alceste, she and Verdi and Puccini, and then in 1960, year of her fortieth birthday, she made a famous "Right to Sing the Blues" album. But this recording comes from the next year, 1961, with a different conductor. I was introduced to it maybe five years ago by Arlene Croce, who is rightly wild about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spr0jyuy41w
(Percy Faith & His Orchestra.)
Ignorant connoisseurs like to debate whether Farrell was a contralto, a soprano, or a mezzo. It seems to me that, like Rosa Ponselle, she was one of those rare natural phenomena with all the equipment to make her natural throughout the voice.The first time I heard this, the pedant in me winced (slightly) at the way she approaches the big notes from below (clean entry into notes is more or less the first criterion for the bel canto method), but there are the times when you just have to rewrite your values. I love the way she plants words within long phrases ("slumber" "dim" have an uncannily profound effect), but the yet greater thing is the vast architecture whereby she releases the power and dramatic imagination of the song, The climax, of course, is "Do you love me?", but she's already diminishing that by the end, so that "As I love you" follows in a far more intimate way. This is oceanic singing, but I can't help feeling that she's suggesting that the point is that this love is "this dream of mine" which will "fade out of sight". (HOW she utters "out of sight"!) Wagner wrote that "Tristan und Isolde" was about love as "an impossible dream"; this is Cole Porter's most Tristanic song. Farrell is lit up by fires within, isn't she? If love is an impossible dream, it's an incandescent dream that makes life better.
Last night, I listened to many recordings of this. It was odd to find which great singers were insufferable (no names) and which good singers were marvellous. But to me this is the great amazement. I listened to a lot of Farrell's classical concert performances on YouTube too: she's mainly sublime, and I'm sorry she seldom recorded a complete opera. Apart from the splendour of the voice itself, she makes every phrase and word count, and never seems unstylish.
I hope you love her too.
Thursday 3 December