Soprano  Carole  Farley

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie



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American soprano Carole Farley (born November 29, 1946) has become one of the most sought-after singers of her generation. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the title role of Lulu, a role she has repeated more than 100 times in four languages (German, English, French and Italian), including the first European production in Zurich. 

In recent seasons Farley performed the role of Emilia Marty in Janáček’s Makrapolous Case in Strasbourg, and her first Kaiserin in Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten in Palermo. She made a triumphant return to the Met as Katerina Ismailova in its new production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. She performed Strauss’Four Last Songs with the Czech State Philharmonic in Brno and recorded them for RCA/BMG; Berg's Seven Early Songs and the Mahler 4th in Spain and in Toulouse with the Orchestre du Capitol; Marie in Wozzeck for Toulouse Opera and Opera de Nice and La Voix Humaine in Finland, and Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins at the Helsinki Festival before embarking on a South American tour with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra singing Britten's Les Illuminations.

To celebrate the Kurt Weill centennial she sang a series of concerts with the Bamberger Symphoniker and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and a recital in Miami in which she traced the steps of his musical journey from Berlin to Broadway to Hollywood. She also concertized with the orchestras of SWR of Baden-Baden and Freiburg, Lyon, BBC, Stockholm, Spokane, and the ABC Orchestras of Australia in evenings of Grieg, Richard and Johann Strauss, Berlioz, Henze, and Wagner.

Other highlights included her first performances of Britten’s War Requiem in San Sebastian, Spain and with the Florida Symphony, and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, as well as Beethoven’s 9th and Ah, Perfido! with the Hague Residenze Orchestra, and Mozart arias with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Bermuda Festival. In addition to extensive concert tours in Lyon, Lille, Toulouse and Grenoble, she sang Weill’s opera The Protagonist with the American Symphony Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall, and made a new Kurt Weill CD for ASV with the Rheinische Philharmonie, including the world premiere recording of Der Neue Orpheus. Other triumphs include Marcel Landowski’s Montsegur at l’Opera de Marseille, Puccini’s Tosca at Stockholm and the American premiere of Marc Neikrug’s Los Alamos at the Aspen Festival. In 1998, she won the coveted Grand Prix du Disque for her CD of Aubert Lemeland’s Omaha [shown below].

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Farley has been a guest of the world's foremost theatres, including Lyric Opera of Chicago, Canadian Opera, Oper der Stadt Koln, New York City Opera, Welsh National, Teatro Colon, Zurich, Dusseldorf, Paris, Torino, Lyon, Brussels, Nice and Florence. Her varied repertoire includes Monteverdi's  L’Incoronazione di Poppea, Massenet's Manon, Mozart's Idomeneo,  Offenbach's Les Contes d’Hoffmann, and  Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus.

Particular highlights in her career include over 50 performances of the acclaimed Paris production of The Merry Widow and the Lyubimov-staged Lulu for Torino which was awarded the Abbiati Prize for best production of an opera in Italy. She has claimed the role of Jenny in Mahagonny as her own following huge successes in Buenos Aires. Her performances of Poulenc's La Voix Humaine and Menotti's The Telephone have been filmed for Decca Laserdisc and VHS in co-production with the BBC.

Her orchestral appearances have included most of the leading orchestras in the US such as the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, and the National Symphony under conductors Zubin Mehta, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Antal Dorati, Andre Kostelanetz and Sergiu Comissiona. Her European orchestra concerts range from the BBC Symphony, Royal Philharmonic, Concertgebouw, Orchestre National de France and the Radio Orchestras of Brussels, Paris, Torino, Cologne, Rome, the Hague, Helsinki and Barcelona with  James Levine, Pierre Boulez, Jean Martinon, Gary Bertini, Nello Santi, Sir John Pritchard, Lorin Maazel, Edward Downes, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Andrew Davis, Lawrence Foster and Ferdinand Leitner.

Farley can be heard on several notable recordings: the Beethoven Ninth Symphony with the Royal Philharmonic under Antal Dorati for Deutsche Grammophone, And Vienna Dances for CBS under Kostelanetz, Tchaikovsky Opera Arias for RCA, Guntram on BBC, Marschner's Der Vampyr on Foni-Cetra with the RAI Rome Orchestra, and, on Chandos Records La Voix Humaine, and Strauss' Final Scenes from Daphne and Capriccio.  Her recording French Songs with Orchestra, the first in a series on ASV Records, received the Deutsche Schallplatten Critics Award. Performed with the RTBF Orchestra of Belgium and conducted by her husband, José Serebrier, it contains works of Chausson, Faure, Satie and Duparc. The second disc in the series contains world premiere recordings of songs by Debussy and Satie. Additional ASV discs include Prokofiev's The Ugly Duckling and albums of Prokofiev songs (one on Chandos, the other on ASV), recordings of Kurt Weill songs, Milhaud songs, Britten's Les Illuminations  (with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra), Tchaikovsky Soprano Arias on IMP Masters with the  Melbourne and Sicilian Symphony Orchestras. Her CD on RCA/BMG of Richard Strauss orchestral songs, including the Four Last Songs with the Czech State Philharmonic was released in 1997 accompanied by her ASV release of Kurt Weill music with the Rheinische Philharmonic.

Her most recent recordings are the highly acclaimed Carole Farley Sings Grieg, and Carole Farley Sings Delius on Dinemec/Koch both with the London Philharmonic and Philharmonia Orchestra and the 2001 release of Naxos’ Ned Rorem Songs  recorded in Nantucket with the composer accompanying her at the piano. VAI International is currently re-releasing the French recordings including the Milhaud songs and the French Songs with Orchestra of Chausson, Debussy and Satie. Upcoming recording plans include Naxos’ Songs of Charles Ives and The Songs of Ernesto Lecuona for BIS.

==  Text of biography mostly from Lombardo Associates website.  
==  Throughout this webpage, names which are links reefer to my interviews elsewhere on my website.  BD  



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In mid-March of 1998, conductor José Serebrier and his wife, Carole Farley, were briefly in Chicago, and I took the opportunity to arrange for interviews.  Sometimes when chatting with couples, there is one conversation with both together.  In this case, I spoke with each artist individually.  They were both very kind, and enjoyed my questions.  Besides the knowledge and understanding they imparted, there was much humor as well.

Portions of both interviews were aired (along with some of their recordings) on WNIB, Classical 97, and the transcript of the time with the conductor has already been posted on my website.  [To read that one, click his name in the box above.]  On this webpage, it is the soprano’s turn.  She had previously been in the Windy City for both Lyric Opera, and the Chicago Symphony (at Ravinia).


Bruce Duffie:   Being a soprano who sings all kinds of repertoire, how do you decide which roles you are going to accept and which roles you are going to decline?

Carole Farley:   That is the problem, of course.

BD:   Is it a good problem or a bad problem?

Farley:   It’s a very good problem usually.  There’s a great deal of choice...

BD:   Is there too much choice?

Farley:   There can definitely be, but one hopefully tries to choose the roles which are good for one’s voice, and good for one’s head, and good for one’s whatever.  There are two ways of looking at it.  You can choose things which are interesting to you, and you can choose things which are interesting to the public, and hopefully both will work out!

BD:   Is this what experience will give you — the knowledge of what is good for your voice and good for your psyche?

Farley:   It’s also a bit serendipity, because people offer you things, and certainly at stages in your career they may be right or they may not be right.  It used to be that people would offer me things which I thought were absolutely ridiculous.  At the beginning of my career, I was offered crazy things like Isolde or Zerbinetta within months of each other.  So you have to be quick enough to try to decide which ones you might survive vocally.

BD:   Did you pick one or the other, or did you let both of them go and stay in a more middle ground?

Farley:   Exactly!  Neither of those were right for me.  I had to try and choose ones which were within my vocal range, and within my capabilities of singing at the time.

BD:   Have you always been working for the long career, knowing that you will do certain roles five or ten years hence?

Farley:   Yes, and I’ve been — touch wood — very lucky up until now having sung some very difficult roles.

BD:   Up to and including Lulu?

Farley:   Yes, and in many, many different languages, including German, English, French and Italian, as well as many performances of such things.  But I have tried very carefully to space the performances several days apart in order to put as little strain on the voice as possible, and not to mix roles at the same time.  In other words, I will stay with one opera at a time, and not go and sing other things between performances which pull you apart.  Hopefully with doing that, I’ve been able to prolong my career, and will continue to do so.

BD:   Lulu is such an immensely difficult role.  How much added difficulty is there learning it in several languages?

Farley:   It’s a considerable vocal complexity, not to mention being a mental exercise.  When I first learned it, it was only the two-act version, which I thought was very difficult at the time.  I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly learn anything more, let alone sing it.  Then it came to be the time when the three-act version was finished by Friedrich Cerha, and it was proposed for me to do it in Paris with Pierre Boulez.  Ultimately Teresa Stratas did that part and very successfully, but I subsequently did do performances staged by Götz Friederich.  I wasn’t originally scheduled to do it, and I had to step in and learn the third act in about ten or eleven days.  So that was pretty difficult.

BD:   Knowing the opera as you did, did Cerha do a good job on that third act?

Farley:   Well, yes and no.  I think the Paris Scene, which is the first scene of the third act, is far too long.  He could have been a little more sparse in the length of it, but it’s very skillfully done, and the London Scene is absolutely beautiful.  It’s some of the most gorgeous music in the whole opera.

BD:   Now the easy question.  How do you make sure that singing a role like Lulu doesn’t damage the voice?

Farley:   How can you be sure that any role will not damage your voice?  You can kill yourself in Mozart, and you can kill yourself in Strauss, and you can probably kill yourself in Berg and anything else.  The key to singing anything well is to have a very secure vocal technique, and try and be as careful as you can.  I always try to sing everything lyrically, and with as much line as possible.

BD:   You just impose the new notes and the new words on the bel canto technique?

Farley:   One tries to do that.  I always think of a Puccini melody as an example of making a beautiful line, and even if it has jagged intervals, you try to connect them as much as possible into a sensible line.  It’s hard sometimes, and especially if you have to cut through a thick orchestra you find yourself having to give a lot of voice.  Another important thing is the pacing, that is how to get from the beginning to the end, and still stay fresh at the end.
 
BD:   I would assume you want to be more than just fresh at the end.

Farley:   Yes, with power, and so on.  So, you have to learn how to prolong your vocal means to the very end.
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BD:   Does that help in the selection of operas, that maybe it’s a little easier towards the end?

Farley:   It can be.  Capriccio is a perfect example of that.

BD:   With its long final scene.

Farley:   Yes.  It’s beautiful, and I did that frequently.  The ending is fabulous, as are all those famous Strauss monologues.
*     *     *     *     *

BD:   When you walk on stage in an opera, are you portraying a character, or do you go out there and become that character?

Farley:   An interesting question...  It’s a little of both.  Hopefully, you do portray what the composer intended as far as the character, but you have to do it within the means of your own life experiences, and what’s inside of you as a human being.  As a special person, each one of us has his or her own special characteristics and human qualities that will enable you to become that character, but perhaps seen through your own eyes and through your own experiences.

BD:   Then how much is you, and how much is the character?

Farley:   Probably a little bit of each, but I don’t know percentage-wise what that might be.

BD:   Does that change from character to character?

Farley:   Oh, I think so, yes.  There are certain characters which you are closer to physically, or in your own appearance than others.  For instance, I recently did an opera in France in which, for the first time, I had to be a man.  I had to portray the composer Pierre Boulez, and I had to be, in fact, two different composers.  So I had a man’s clothing, and a man’s hairstyle, and a man’s wig, and a man’s features.  This is the first time I’d ever portrayed a man, so your imagination had to take on a different turn.

BD:   Plus, this was not just some man, but a specific man, and a known man.

Farley:   Yes, exactly!

BD:   You’d never done any trouser roles before?

Farley:   No.

BD:   Not Cherubino, nor the Composer in Ariadne, or anything like that?

Farley:   No, never anything like that.  Usually, I play these wonderful femme-fatales, and frequently they are crazy people.  So it was quite a challenge.

BD:   This is something I like to ask sopranos.  You’re portraying a woman who is maybe a hundred or two hundred years removed from today, and yet the women’s movement today has made women feel stronger and more liberated and more capable.  Yet you’re out there generally portraying a victim.  How do you reconcile being on the stage like this, knowing you’re trying to communicate with the audience of women of today?

Farley:   You have to be more than one person to do it all!  It’s amazing how versatile you have to be, but you have to remember that you’re in a historical time period, whether you’re doing Poppea, or one of the Mozart heroines, or whatever.  You are in effect stuck into how the woman would have felt at that time, but you have the advantage of seeing into the future because you’re actually in the future.  So you have both things, and you have to try and imagine what you would have felt like if you’d have had the constraints that those ladies had at that time.

BD:   It sounds confining...

Farley:   ...and enriching.

BD:   Do you like playing these less advanced ladies?

Farley:   Yes, I like playing a variety of different roles.  That is what keeps my job very interesting, in that we have to play such a wide variety of different people.  Let’s take Tchaikovsky as an example.  You play a wonderful heroine from the time of Pushkin, and then you’re at the same time expected to sing something by Janáček, which is totally different in every respect.  So it’s quite a challenge.

BD:   Are these characters real?

Farley:   They could have been, and sometimes they are.  Sometimes you play characters which are walking around in the streets today if you play a contemporary character, and maybe there’s a little bit of those older characters even today.

BD:   Is there a little bit of you in each of the characters you play?

Farley:   Probably.

BD:   Is there a little bit of all of these characters in the real you?

Farley:   Maybe... who knows?  It’s a very interesting profession.  We have lots of challenges to research and to try and bring to life.  One of the most interesting things is bringing this into play, so it appears that it’s happening right now.

BD:   Are there any of the characters that you play which are a little too close to the real you?

Farley:   I can’t think of a specific example, but frequently one has to deal with murdering, or poisoning, or all sorts of deaths.  Although one is usually not touched by death, you do have to think about such a thing, and you have to decide how you’re going to handle something like that.  You have all these incredible emotions to deal with, and at the same time you have to think about musical matters such as counting, and rhythm, and melody, and staging, and which language you’re singing.  So you really have quite a lot to think about at one time.  [Laughs]

BD:   I hope you’re not a ‘method actor’.

Farley:   When you have to decide how you’re going to get this done, a lot of different regisseurs have different ways of approaching it.  [Note that the interviewer scoots a little bit away from the guest amide gales of laughter]  Don’t worry!  I’m totally under control...  [More laughter]
*     *     *     *     *
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BD:   You sing all over the world.  Do you change your technique at all for the size of the house?

Farley:   Your technique doesn’t change, but you have to gauge it according to how small or large the auditorium is, and how bad or good the acoustic is, and how sympathetic or unsympathetic the conductor is at being able to hold down the orchestra so that you can go over it.  These things are always variables which change.

BD:   Does the size of the house ever enter into your decision as to whether you will accept a contract?

Farley:   It can.  A good example of that would be the opera Salome, which I sing very frequently.  I’m very careful as to what size house that I sing it in, and if it’s a very large house, I have to make sure that it has a very good acoustic.

BD:   You are able to take advantage of the acoustics?

Farley:   Hopefully yes, but it’s a real problem particularly in America where the houses are very large, as opposed to the European houses which are usually about half the size.  So that makes a big difference.

BD:   Can we assume that the small houses don’t necessarily have good acoustics?

Farley:   Not always.  It depends on whether it was built recently or long in the past!

BD:   Are they getting better or worse?  [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interview with Siegmund Nimsgern.]

Farley:   It depends.  I understand your new hall here is a considerable improvement, but one never knows.  [This would be the renovation of Orchestra Hall, home of the Chicago Symphony.]  Acousticians are supposed to be experts, but it’s a little bit of experimental science even at its best.

BD:   Some of the operas you sing present victims, and others have strong heroines.  Are these operas for everyone?

Farley:   Probably not.  There are so many different people in the world today, and many of them have experience and knowledge, but not everybody does.  You have to realize that the general public comes really to be entertained, and they may not have a lot of knowledge of various situations.  A child will have no preconceptions, and will readily accept nearly anything, but an adult is not really like that, and even though they might be open to new things, they may also be closed in a certain sense, because they already know what they like.  Some people like Wagner while others hate it, and some people think it’s so long that they can’t sit through five hours.  Mozart sometimes is not everybody’s cup of tea.  Everybody has their own ideas about what they like, but if a season is properly planned, you can give each listener something.  There will be a little bit of everything, so that the majority will be satisfied and the people who are specialists will also get what they like, too.

BD:   Now you bring up a word that I want to pounce on, and that is ‘entertainment’.  In opera, how much is art and how much is entertainment, and where’s the balance between them?

Farley:   That’s a very difficult question because we are more and more influenced by everything around us, including movies, television, videos, and computers.  All of these things are going to influence what the public likes, and what their taste are, and it does change their tastes.

BD:   [Gently protesting]  Yet it’s still Verdi, or it’s still Berg.

Farley:   Yes, I suppose, but let’s take sopranos as an example.  We are tremendously influenced today by movies, and singers are quite aware that they have to look like the characters that they portray much more so than they used to in the past.

BD:   You can’t just go out there and sing as they did 50 or 100 years ago?

Farley:   You still have to sing well, but you also can try and look as attractive as possible, and move reasonably well.  You need to try and follow the story as much as possible so that the audience can actually believe that you are that character, as opposed to just standing there and singing.  The vocalism is important, but it’s maybe only one facet of what opera is.

BD:   What are some of the other facets?

Farley:   You’ve frequently got these wonderful historical situations taking place.  Many operas depict great plays, and you have to try and make them come to life as the composer imagined.

BD:   Perhaps in your case it’s not as relevant as for a male singer, but is it easier or harder portraying a real historical figure as opposed to a fictional character?

Farley:   Men have sword fights and other such things that ladies usually don’t have, but we have other things to deal with, such as enormous skirts or difficult costumes.  You might even have to wear wonderful corsets.

BD:   I can’t imagine how you could sing in one of those!

Farley:   You can hardly breathe!  They’d zip you or lace you into these things, and you think you can’t even breath let alone sing!  But you learn to cope with a lot of occupational hazards along the way.

BD:   Do you then go to the costumer and use your ‘method acting’?  [Gales of laughter]

Farley:   I say, “Don’t do this to me!”  [More laughter]

BD:   Without being specific, have there been cases where you have either really objected to a direction or a costume, or walked out of a production for some reason?

Farley:   Yes... not specifically for a costume reason, but I’ve had some very difficult situations.  One of them was with Lulu in Italy.  A very famous designer spent millions on fantastic costumes with fabrics to die for, and his stage designs were equally opulent.  He had also envisioned putting a carpet on the floor.  I don’t know how you feel about carpets, but most singers detest them because they often eat up the sound.  Evelyn Lear and Andrew Foldi were in the cast, and these are people that have been around and done productions for a long time.  When we came to the rehearsal, this enormous stage was covered with a huge carpet, one of those thick white ones like a bearskin rug.  I looked at it and thought this will never work!  So, I called the designer aside and I said we’re going to have to get rid of this carpet.  He said, “Oh, no, no, no!  This is part of my design, and I want it to stay.”  So, we singers got together and talked to each other, and finally decided to take a stand.  We were not going to do this production if this carpet was going to stay.  We went back to our hotels, and the next day they said they were going to fix it.  They said everything was going to be fine.  When we arrived for the next rehearsal, we found that each one of us had been assigned to stand in a little rectangle which had been cut into the carpet.  There was no carpet in each particular rectangle, but they neglected to think that we had to move from Point A to Point B, and there was carpet between those spots.

BD:   They thought it was comfort in standing, rather than acoustics that you were talking about?
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Farley:   Exactly.

BD:   In the end, did the carpet stay or go?

Farley:   It had to go!

BD:   Is it intimidating at all for you to sing Lulu when there is another famous Lulu in the cast?

Farley:   At first I was a little apprehensive.  Evelyn was singing Countess Geschwitz, and indeed I admired her very much.  But she couldn’t have been nicer, and we actually worked together many, many times.  I found her a very, very fine colleague, and a great support to me.  This happened also in Salome, which I sang with Astrid Varnay.

BD:   She was Herodias?

Farley:   Yes.  Once in a while you get a situation like that which is a great privilege and pleasure.

BD:   Do you find that your performance goes up when the caliber of your colleagues is high?

Farley:   It has a lot to do with how you perform.  One always tries to give one’s best, but when you’ve got living legends standing on the stage right next to you, it does tend to keep you on your toes, and make you especially careful.

BD:   Are you striving to become a living legend?

Farley:   Not consciously.  I’m always searching and trying to do better than I did before, and even if I do a role a hundred times, I’m still looking for a different way to do it.  I’m not a singer who comes in and says, “I’ve done it this way a hundred times, and I have to do it exactly like that again,” because the situation is always different.  Your colleagues are different, the place is different, the production is different, maybe the language is different, and everything changes according to that.  It’s fascinating to look at it from a different angle.

BD:   Do you feel you’re part of a lineage of singers dating back a couple of hundred years?

Farley:   Oh, definitely.  I think it would be really fascinating to go back to the early part of this century and be able to listen to and view how someone sang a role which is difficult to sing today.  The vocal standards are maybe not exactly the same as they were twenty-five or fifty years ago.  An artform has to change.  It can never stay the same.

BD:   It’s always growing in some way?

Farley:   Yes, and changing and doing different things.  Everything changes, and we’re always influenced by the things around us.

BD:   Let me ask a really easy question.  What is the purpose of music?

Farley:   Oh, wow!  [Thinks a moment]  Hopefully it’s to enhance the beauty of sound, whatever that may be, and sometimes maybe it’s not always beautiful.  I suppose there’s cacophony in everything.  Nothing is always beautiful or always ugly.  You have mountains and valleys, and different colors.  Some days are gray, some days have bright sunshine, and music fits into those categories as well.  You’ve got all different kinds of music, and the purpose of music is whatever the listener has in his own mind.

BD:   So, you are one singer, but there might be 2,000 purposes out there?

Farley:   It could be, or maybe they could all be the same.  They may all run down the same lines, but from different viewpoints.  Music is one of the great art forms because there are so many different forms.  Think about pop music, and jazz, and ancient music, and church music.  It can take any form, and the variety is really phenomenal.

BD:   Can we take it that you revel in this variety?

Farley:   I do!  It’s one of the great joys and pleasures that we have today.  However, it’s not always fantastic when you walk into an elevator and hear canned music coming from the loudspeakers.  That’s not always pleasurable.

BD:   You don’t want to hear a little snippet of this and the little snippet of that as you ride up twenty-two floors?

Farley:   No, that’s not always such fun.  [Both laugh]  But there are other situations which can be fantastic.

BD:   Do you like being a wandering minstrel?

Farley:   Yes.  We have to love it.  Otherwise you’d have to choose something else.  But if you take it as a challenge, and accept that traveling is part of your life, then yes, I enjoy that.  I enjoy the change.  Of course, it’s very difficult having your body being your instrument, so you have to keep it in top form.

BD:   Are you part athlete?

Farley:   Yes, I try to keep myself in very good shape.  I try to go to the gym, and get some kind of exercise every day so that I can continue to perform well.  That’s part of staying healthy.
*     *     *     *     *

BD:   How do you divide your career between operas and concerts?

Farley:   I do pretty equal amounts of operatic, symphonic, and recording.  There are not too many piano-vocal recitals at the moment, but I hope that will change.  I hope that with time they will come back into vogue the way it used to be.  I love doing songs.  It’s a wonderful variety of repertoire which we have.  Unfortunately, the public seems to have lost a lot of the interest that they used to have, at least in this country.  But things go in cycles, and maybe that’s going to change.  So, I do separate opera, recording, and orchestral performances.  It would be about 25/25/25.
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BD:   And then 25 for you?

Farley:   Yes.

BD:   [With mock horror]  You actually have to have a real life???

Farley:   [Laughs]  Yes, I have a real life, too!  I do a lot of interesting things in my so-called spare time.

BD:   You mean besides just learning new roles?

Farley:   Yes, absolutely!  [More laughter]  I try to do some reading and explore some other interests which I have.

BD:   Earlier we were talking about different acoustics in different houses.  Do you change your technique at all for the microphone?

Farley:   Yes.  I would say slightly, although I don’t know if I can explain how I do that.  I sing exactly the same, but you have to imagine that you have a public around you, so that you create as much of the live atmosphere as possible.  I have colleagues who don’t really enjoy recording because they feel this lack of a public to feed off of.  But I’ve been very comfortable working in front of a microphone.  The main problem is the distance between you and the microphone.  If you have a good producer and a good engineer, then once that’s established you can pretty much relax and just worry about singing... which is already enough to worry about!  The technique of singing really stays the same, but you don’t have to project into a large house.

BD:   Do they keep the microphone far enough away to get the full bloom of the voice?

Farley:   Yes.  It shouldn’t be too close because it would pick up things which should not be heard.  It’s not that you wouldn’t like the way they sound, but a bit of space is necessary to make it sound natural.

BD:   Some of the pop singers these days have little headset microphones so they can scream right into them.

Farley:   Exactly, but that is definitely a different technique than we opera singers use... although I have been in situations in which I had to sing while being amplified.

BD:   Was it a stationary microphone, or a microphone placed on you?

Farley:   It was on me, in my hair.  You learn to forget it.  Once I did a production where I had a remote-control box behind me sewed into my costume.  Somebody would have to come along and turn me on and turn me off!  [Both laugh]  But that’s quite unusual!

BD:   I just wondered if it bothered you hearing your voice amplified, as opposed to just your voice in the resonance?

Farley:   It can.  If they don’t it properly, it can be very annoying if you hear yourself reverberating from all different directions.  It’s very confusing so, I prefer it to be a normal, unamplified situation.

BD:   Do you ever sing outdoors?

Farley:   I have, although it’s not one of my favorite venues.  I did a wonderful tour a couple of summers ago in which I sang with the Sicilian Symphony Orchestra in Palermo.  We went into fantastic amphitheaters all throughout the whole island, and we would travel with the whole orchestra.  I did twelve performances in fourteen days in the month of June, and it was incredibly hot and humid.  We would have to travel three or four hours to get to each one, and I would get there and find that I’d have no dressing room.  Once I didn’t even have a mirror, but these are the circumstances that you have to deal with.

BD:   [With a wink]  Did you survive?

Farley:   I did!  Another concert was outside, and it began at about 9.30 PM, and it was fabulous.  I would see the water of the Mediterranean as I was singing.  The sun had gone down, and it was like in a dream.  Someone came to me afterwards and said, “Did you know there were bats flying over your head?  I was wondering if one of them might get caught in your hair.”  It never did happen, so it’s better not to know!  [Laughs]

BD:   [Slyly]  I hope you weren’t singing something from Die Fledermaus [The Bat, by Johann Strauss, Jr.]!

Farley:   No, not that night!  [Gales of laughter]

BD:   Do you remember that, and try not to go to that venue again?

Farley:   Yes, you try...  There’s never a dull moment!

BD:   I’m glad singing is always exciting for you.

Farley:   Yes, it is!  It’s more interesting that way.  It never gets boring, and it’s never routine.  It’s always an interesting profession.
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BD:   What advice do you have for younger singers coming along?

Farley:   Technique is the most important gift that a teacher can give to anybody, whether it be a singer, or an instrumentalist, or whatever.  But especially for singers, the most important thing is to have a solid vocal technique, because that is what will keep you going.  Many singers have natural voices which just work perfectly and wonderfully at the beginning.  But when it really gets difficult, then you have to know exactly how to approach the role vocally, and how your voice works.  Not every singer knows that.

BD:   So, you’d better know why your voice works the way it does?

Farley:   That’s right.  Many singers of the past knew how to use their voices when they worked right, but when things began to go wrong, then they didn’t know exactly what it was they were doing.  The interesting thing is to try and figure out how your voice works, and although there are parallels in technique, each singer has their own image of how their voice works.  So you have to figure out how your voice works, and how you can control the way that it works, and that’s a pretty difficult task.

BD:   Is it always important to have another set of ears out there in the hall listening?
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Farley:   Always, always!  You can’t hear yourself the way other people hear you.  Many times you think that you sound great, and then you listen to a tape and you wonder how you could sound like that!  On other nights you hear people say that it was fantastic, and you think you just were awful!  So, it’s never the same.

BD:   I would think you would be the worst person to judge how you did.

Farley:   Often you are!  You just can’t separate yourself enough to go and stand away from yourself, so that you can be objective about it.

BD:   Would you want to clone yourself to be out there listening to yourself?

Farley:   Probably not!  [Much laughter]

BD:   What advice do you have for audiences?

Farley:   It’s just great the number of wonderful orchestras and opera houses that we have today, and the more a listener can expose himself to, the better.  We have wonderful records, and videos, and even movies of operas and performances.  Listeners or viewers of the past didn’t have this wealth of information available, so it’s really interesting to utilize all of this, whether it will be going to a library, or buying a record from a store and listening to it, or reading the program notes.  All of that background is available, and can do nothing but make it more enjoyable.  The more you know about it, the better it is.

BD:   Are we getting a more informed public?

Farley:   I think so.  I hope so!  I’m a bit worried, though, about the lack of music education in the schools.  I don’t know what will become of the kids in the future, because they don’t really have the same type of musical education that we were lucky enough to have.  But maybe it will take a different form with all the information on the internet, and with computers, and so on.  Maybe the children of the future will have a different way of being taught things of the past.  [Remember, this interview took place in 1998!]

BD:   Maybe you can be the first cyber soprano!

Farley:   Do you think so?  [Gales of laughter]

BD:   Would you want to be?

Farley:   I don’t know how to answer that.  [More laughter]

BD:   You’ve worked a lot with new music.  What advice do you have for composers who want to write for the human voice?

Farley:   Remember that we have only these two little vocal cords in our throats.  They’re muscles, and although they’re extremely flexible, sometimes it’s not possible to jump two octaves at a time and still maintain a vocal line.  You do have to think about that when writing a piece.  There should be some sort of a relationship between the notes, so that it is possible to sing it.

BD:   [With a wink]  You mean you’re not a clarinet???

Farley:   [Laughs]  Not really, although I’ve tried to be at times!  It doesn’t always work out the way the composer intended it to work out, and I frequently have had to change things.  I’ve had things composed especially for me.

BD:   Do you then work with the composer?

Farley:   Yes, but sometimes they write it before they consult you, and then you have to go to the trouble of suggesting (very tactfully) that this might not be the best way to write their idea.  It might be that the language doesn’t lend itself to the vocal line.  It might work better in other ways.  It has to be adaptable, and a smart composer, or sympathetic composer is open to suggestions which a singer could bring.  You can make suggestions, and, of course, the composer can make suggestions to the singer how it could be best achieved as well.  So you could help each other.

BD:   Are there times when the composer has gently forced you to extend yourself, and the composer was right?

Farley:   Yes, they can, of course.  They have a vision of what it is they want, and you have to try and do that if it’s at all possible.  But sometimes it’s not possible, so then you have to say, “I really don’t think it would be possible for my voice.  Maybe somebody else can do it, but I don’t think I can.”

BD:   I’m glad lots of things are possible for you!

Farley:   Yes, indeed!

BD:   You are married to a conductor.  Is it special to work with him?

Farley:   Very!  I feel very privileged because we have a lot in common, and it’s very helpful to me to have a fine musician who has such a fantastic ear for balance.  One of the most important things in letting a singer be heard is not to be overwhelmed, but be supported well enough.  I like to have a firm accompaniment underneath me, yet one that makes sure my voice carries over the orchestra.  Since he’s also a composer, he brings another very special element to his conducting, in that he can view it as a composer.  That’s very unique, and very special.

BD:   Is singing fun?

Farley:   Oh, it’s great fun!  It’s absolutely wonderful.  I never wake up any day that I don’t think how lucky I am to be able to do what it is I love so much.

 BD:   I assume there are lots more recordings coming along and being planned?

Farley:   Indeed, yes, all the time!  I have a lot of new ones out right now, and lot more ideas.  We just finished a beautiful album of Delius songs, including some world premieres... Scandinavian songs and Danish songs...

BD:   How’s your Danish?

Farley:   It doesn’t exist but my Norwegian exists.  I’ve just done a Grieg album of songs with orchestra, so Norwegian is my newest language, but the Scandinavian songs were originally written by Delius in English and German, although the poems were in Danish, but he never actually did write the songs in Danish, which is curious.

BD:   He set them in the languages he knew.

Farley:   Yes, interestingly enough.

BD:   Thank you for being a singer, and for all of the artistry you’ve given us.

Farley:   Thank you!  A pleasure!
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© 1998 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on March 16, 1998.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB later that year.  This transcription was made in 2025, and posted on this website at that time.  My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.  To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests.  He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago.  You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.