Stolen Island Soprano

One of the best sopranos in the U.S. has neither a Metropolitan Opera nor a recording contract, although for 15 years she has been a nationwide radio favorite. Her name: Eileen Farrell, 35, the buxom wife of a Staten Island policeman.

Since her 1941 radio debut on the MARCH OF TIME (where she sang as the voice of Rosa Ponselle), Soprano Farrell's voice has grown in range, flexibility and control--as she demonstrated last week when she sang with the famed Bach Aria Group in Manhattan's Town Hall. She steered the opulent sounds of her voice gracefully along the sometimes tortured paths of Bach's counterpoint. Its gamut was smooth and even from the light, flutey high notes, where sopranos often lose character, to rich, viola-like lows. When she finished her arias, she accepted her heavy applause and sat down serenely, secure in the knowledge that she could remain at the top of the concert heap indefinitely.

Gadabout Homebody. The next step would normally be the Met, but the rigors of opera do not suit Soprano Farrell's easygoing Irish temperament, or her ideas of how to live the good life. After all, her parents were the Singing O'Farrells, whose song-and-dance act played the Keith vaudeville circuit in the early 1900s.

She showed an early talent for painting and horseplay, but her voice took over, and she landed a regular singing job at CBS when she was 21. One day at her dressmaker's, she met an Irish cop from Staten Island. His name was Robert Vincent Reagan, and he was investigating a threatening letter received by the dressmaker. Reagan and Farrell were married in 1945, settled down in Staten Island, just a ferry ride from Manhattan. Then and there, Eileen Farrell found that she was a homebody with a true devotion to cooking and children (the Reagans have two). Nevertheless, she managed to sing 60 concerts a year across the U.S. This year she decided to cut down in favor of Manhattan appearances and guest shots. Her usual New York dates: three a year with the high-minded, highly popular Bach Aria Group, plus regular appearances on The Telephone Hour.

Recently, her interest has been turning toward opera. She scored a hit in Berg's Wozzeck, when Dimitri Mitropoulos gave a concert version with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony (TIME, April 23, 1951). A year ago, when M-G-M made Unfinished Melody, about the life of onetime Metropolitan Opera Soprano Marjorie Lawrence, Soprano Farrell went to Hollywood to dub in her voice (the part was played by Cinemactress Eleanor Parker). Singer Farrell displayed all the instincts of a born vaudevillian. Says she: "When Lawrence drops to the stage with polio while singing the Liebestod, I sang with frogs in my throat because she wasn't feeling well, and then I cracked at the end when she falls down. Can I crack at will? I'll say I can!"

Stylish Stout. Last month she undertook still another operatic assignment, in the name part of Cherubini's Medea, done in concert form in Manhattan's Town Hall. The role is one of opera's most difficult, but it held no terrors for Soprano Farrell. During rehearsal her attitude was playful. She kidded the French horn player for a minute burble, grinned delightedly at the violins when they produced a soaring harmony. While her voice was deep in Medea's wells of grief, jealousy, and hatred, she artlessly combed her hair for a press photographer. In the performance, however, she threw herself into the deeply demanding music, sang with power and beauty of tone that gave her audience chills. "They say it is hard," she said. "I think Bach is harder because I have to hold myself down, and that takes control. In Medea, I just open my big mouth and let it rip."

The Met, which is to singers what the Palace was to Eileen Farrell's vaudeville parents, is sagging under a bumper crop of top sopranos and has made Farrell no overtures. She does not mind, among other reasons because she is not willing to trim her imposing figure to the stylish slimness theoretically desired, if rarely attained, at the Met. Says she: "I tried, but I felt terrible."

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