In 1941, she got her own program, Eileen Farrell Sings, where she performed songs and lighter classical music. She auditioned for various radio shows and was hired by CBS for chorus and ensemble work. Her parents were both singers, The Singing O’Farrells, and recognizing her potential, sent her to study voice in New York. She sang relatively few fully-staged performances and was ambivalent about opera and particularly opera house management throughout her entire career (when she taught at Indiana University, she hung a sign outside her office that read, “Help stamp out opera.”) Her voice was huge, but capable of great nuances in volume and expressiveness as well as rapid and accurate coloratura, letting her sing bel canto roles such as Cherubini’s Medea, the spinto-coloratura Leonora in Verdi’s Il trovatore, the verismo Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana, and the great Wagner parts of Isolde and Brünnhilde (in concert). She was in fact much more comfortable on the concert stage, on radio, and in the recording studio than in the opera house. Eileen Farrell was as authentic and natural a blues and jazz singer as she was an operatic soprano. While opera singers who dabble in popular music are common, those who do so successfully are rare, and those with large dramatic voices who do so are rarer still.
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