No, you don’t Doris — and shame on you, Eileen, for encouraging her. A excerpt from David Kaufman’s new biography on Doris Day.
Among the more tantalizing projects conceived for Day was I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Classics, an album inspired by one that Columbia had brought out that year, opera singer Eileen Farrell’s I’ve Got a Right To Sing the Blues. If the hefty Wagnerian soprano could record Harold Arlen standards, why couldn’t Day record classical pieces? “I used to give Doris classical records,” Harbert said
Note: that’s James Harbert, Doris Day’s rehearsal pianist, musical arranger, orchestra leader, and apparently all-round “musical advisor”.
He introduced her to Wagner’s “Liebestod” - “one of the sexiest pieces ever written”, he added. “And she loved the recording of George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. She asked for another copy to give to someone else. If she had gone the classical route, she would have ended up at the Met.”
Note: Fellow Fanatics, we fall-out every time we read that last bit, don’t we?. But that’s exactly what the book says “he” said. I’m not certain about much in life, but I am sure that Doris Day would not have ended at the Met. Jeanette MacDonald never even made it to the Met, for heaven’s sake. Besides, by the time Doris would have gone the classical route, a new regime would be in power at the Met. If Rudolf Bing had trouble with Traubel, what would he have had with Day? “Calamity”?
But Day feared she wasn’t up to the task of cutting such a record, and she was hesitant at first. Harbert softened her nerves by assuring her there were a number of well-known classical pieces that did not “require a huge operatic range.” She warmed to the idea. Harbert remembered working with her on Mozart’s “Voi che sapete” (from The Marriage of Figaro). After Day said, “Well, that’s simple,” Harbert answered, “For you, it is … We may have worked on a song by Ravel or Debussy as well,” he continued. “She especially liked the idea of our just doing it with the piano, as opposed to with a big orchestra.”
Though it was Harbert’s supervisor, Irving Townsend, who produced the Farrell crossover album, he proved instrumental in quashing I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Classics. “It’s a cute idea,” Townsend told Harbert. “But if the critics take her task for daring into the classical field, she’s going to get upset and we’ll never be able to get her to record anything again.”
Note: To honor a great patriotic American, I proclaim today “Irving Townsend Day”. I just wish Townsend could have gotten to Barbra in time, too. Hey, as a symbolic gesture, let’s go quash our “Classical Barbras” right now. All of us. Let’s do it. EVERYBODY… RIGHT NOW!
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Kevin 06.30.08 at 1:29 pm
That’s assuming we have any “Classical Barbras” to smash. I for one have never even heard anything from it.
James Harbert 07.08.08 at 2:01 am
Dear Philly Opera Fanatic,
“There’s no accounting for taste.” Or, as we used to say at the Curtis Institute, “lack of it.”
What a pity that you (and others less pretentious) will never get to hear Doris Day touching performance of Mozart’s “Voi Che Sapete” or “Asie” from Ravel’s Shéhérazade. She had an incredible ear and a great feel for both “pop” and “art music.” (Yes, Alex Ross, I, too, dislike those terms.) As for “I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Classics,” I may have misled David Kaufman a bit. She never took the project all that seriously. In fact, just as a spoof, she asked me to find some far-out aria we could perform for Irving Townsend and demand that Columbia release it as a pop single. I brought her Schoenberg’s “Mondestrunken” from Pierrot Lunaire. The sprechstimme? She pulled it off without a hitch. Only one hurdle: we couldn’t get through it without breaking up!
Note: As a former Philadelphian, I have a suggestion for you: Go eat a hoagie! And while savoring it, remind yourself that, as Brendan Behan put it: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.”
NYCOF 07.08.08 at 2:31 am
Thanking for chiming in, Mr Harbert. Such insight, how wonderful. I love me some Doris Day, make no mistake about that. I think Mozart would have been all wrong for her though. Maybe you simply didn’t aim HIGH enough. Doris Day’s Minnie a la Calamity Jane? Doris Day’s Turandot a la Ice Princess Jan Morrow (with Rock Hudson’s Calaf, of course)?
name 09.01.08 at 12:06 am
Hello!,