Edwina Eustis Dick: 

The Contralto Who Cared

Edwina Eustis Dick was a singer who spent as much time helping others as she did at her career.

Born in New York in 1908, Edwina Eustis was one of the youngest singers to win a scholarship to Juilliard, doing so before even graduating from high school. She also studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and, after graduating, won the coveted Naumburg Award.

As a contralto, she sang leading roles with opera companies in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and other cities, and was a soloist with the New York Philharmonic and other leading orchestras, singing under Stokowski, Toscanini, Reiner, Iturbi, and Metropoulos. The New York Times once said she “possessed one of the most richly satisfying mezzo-soprano voices of our time.” (Her voice can still be heard on Sony Masterworks recordings.) 

In the 1930s, she worked with the Musicians Emergency Aid to help create jobs for unemployed musicians. She also worked with special education children in a New York City public school where she was successful in teaching music to a 16-year-old boy, who was unable  to speak, read, or write.

During World War II,  Eustis performed more than 1,000 times during a two and a half year USO tour that took her to all five Atlantic and three Pacific theatres. The songs of her regular program were always chosen by the troops from lists posted on bulletin boards ahead of her arrival. She also sang the church services with chaplains and for the wounded in hospital wards. While she was in Italy with the Fifth Army, she sang as many as seven church services on a single Sunday.

Among her more unusual performances were singing before the Shah of Iran and King Farouk in anti-German propaganda concerts, nine Christmas shows with a G.I. choir in Shanghai, a concert for Mrs. Douglas MacArthur and her son in Tokyo, and Holy Week services on a troop ship returning from Japan.

After the war, she undertook a pioneering project at a Long Island hospital in music therapy for the mentally ill, which led to doctors’ classifying music as “therapy.” She also trained young musicians in the new field of music therapy, and an annual scholarship in her name is offered by the American Music Therapy Association. 

Mrs. Dick and her husband, attorney Alexander C. Dick, were founding members of the American Symphony Orchestra, organized and conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Both locally and nationally, the Dicks were active in Republican politics — she served for a time as secretary of the Executive Committee of the Women’s National Republican Club. In Ridgefield she was active in the First Church of Christ, Scientist, on Main Street.  

In 1990, the Connecticut General Assembly honored “her long and successful career in music, her generous donation of time and talent to improving the lives of others, as well as her distinguished career in public service.”

She was a strong supporter of the U.S. troops and in 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, she wrote the Press: ”At a time when the men and women in our armed forces are facing their greatest test, we, at home, are facing a test as well. Our task is to maintain our unity and resolve as our troops are doing in the Persian Gulf...Our soldiers have said they have a job to do and are going to get it done. I feel I have a job to do, too, and that is to stand up in strong support of our magnificent troops.”

“Edwina was also a fun person!” said Henrietta Parsons, a friend. “She loved to body surf in the ocean—yes! an opera singer that body surfs.  Edwina and Alex had a summer house on Fire Island.  She would romp around the surf and just loved it!”

She lived  from the 1950s through the 1980s on Old Branchville Road, but moved to Heritage Village in Southbury after the death of her husband. She died there in 1997 at the age of 88. 

A road built in 1999 on part of her former homestead was named Eustis Lane.

Geraldine Farrar: 

A Great Human Being

Geraldine Farrar was still a teenager when she became a star, heralded around the world for her voice as well as her acting ability.

One of the Metropolitan Opera’s greatest lyric sopranos, Miss Farrar had spent 16 years with the company, singing the leads in Madama Butterfly, Carmen, Tosca, and many other productions.   

“Miss Farrar was the last of a great operatic tradition set by such stars as Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti,” The Ridgefield Press said in her obituary. 

Born in Massachusetts in 1882, she was a daughter of Sidney Farrar, a 19th Century professional baseball player with the Philadelphia Phillies, who later lived on North Salem Road—Farrar Lane is named after him, not his more famous daughter. He bought the place in 1923 and the story about his moving in said ”His daughter, Geraldine Farrar, will arrive later, it is expected.” 

Sidney Farrar and his wife, both church singers, sent Geraldine to singing lessons when she was 12.  

In 1901, she made her debut with the Royal Opera in Berlin and so impressed Lilli Lehmann that the star took Miss Farrar as a pupil. She went on to sing with companies all over Europe. She made her acclaimed debut with the Met in 1906, and over the following years, shared leading roles

with such greats as Caruso, Scotti, and Louise Homer. She knew many notables in the arts, including Camille Saint-Saens, Giacomo Puccini, Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, Nellie Melba, Fritz Kreisler, and Jules Massenet. She was also the lover of Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini (who twice performed in Ridgefield). She made several films, including Carmen and Joan of Arc. 

When she sang her last role in 1922, “a cheering crowd surged forward shouting her name,” The Press said. “Outside 40th Street between Broadway and Eight was a solid mass of fans.”  

For years, recordings of her music were produced, and are still being sold today.

She wrote two autobiographies, “Geraldine Farrar: The Story of An American Singer” (1916) and “Such Sweet Compulsion” (1938). Several biographies have also been written.

In 1924, a year after her parents moved here, she acquired Fairhaven, a large home on West Lane. In 1954, she decided to downsize and, with her companion of 50 years, Sylvia Blein, moved to a much smaller place on New Street.

During her years in Ridgefield, Farrar didn’t just twiddle her thumbs. She did  much work for

the Red Cross, and during the war, drove for the American Women’s Voluntary Services and served on the War Price and Ration Board. She also helped the Girl Scouts and served as finance chairman of the organization. She sang at fund-raising concerts for Danbury Hospital in the late 1930s.

On the night she died in 1967 at the age of 85, the Metropolitan Opera was performing Madama Butterfly, an opera Farrar had starred in nearly 100 times. That week, The Press suggested her epitaph might be a sentiment she herself once expressed: “Far more important than being a great artist is to become a great human being.” 

William Matheus Sullivan: 

The Man from Dunrovin

His name may be hardly known in Ridgefield today, but ask Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman, or Renee Fleming who William Matheus Sullivan was, and they will tell you.

Ridgefield was once the home of Sullivan and his Dunrovin Music Festival that brought major opera and chamber music personalities to a privately created opera house off West Lane.  

He also created a foundation that has helped many of the top opera singers of the past half century.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y.,  Sullivan was born in 1885 and graduated from Columbia University’s School of Law. He was an attorney for the Metropolitan Opera and for many of its singers, including Elisabeth Rethberg and Frieda Hempel, and often entertained celebrities in the arts at his Manhattan home. 

“He sponsored many first concerts for artists who have since become famous at his music room at his New York apartment,” said one account.

He personally sponsored violin prodigy Ruggiero Ricci (1918-2012) as a young boy; Ricci went on to become an international star, specializing in Paganini, who made more than 500 recordings and performed in more than 5,000 concerts. 

In 1936, Sullivan bought Dunrovin, the estate of the late Melbert B. Cary, as his country home.  He converted a carriage house into a theater modeled after Frederick the Great’s opera house in Bayreuth, Germany — one observer at the time described it as “the best private concert hall in the United States.” Sullivan planned to call it the Mozart Concert Hall but it soon became better known as “the Playhouse at Dunrovin.”

The building could comfortably seat 360 people and, in good weather, 100 more could be seated on the terrace. For more intimate gatherings of 150 or so, Sullivan provided Florentine oak chairs. 

The flooring was random oak boards, pegged into place — more than 3,500 pegs were used. A painting of an ancestral Sullivan castle in Killarney and Van Dyke’s “The Rest of the Holy Family during the Flight to Egypt” hung on the walls.

In 1937, Sullivan began staging music festivals in the playhouse that featured such popular operatic voices as Lily Pons, Grace Moore, Lawrence Tibbett, Edward Johnson, and Geraldine Farrar, who lived just up the road. The festivals on successive Saturday afternoons in the summer were aimed at introduced young operatic talent and raising money for music scholarships.

Gov. Wilbur Cross attended the opening concert and Sir Hugh Walpole, the English novelist and a friend of Sullivan, provided a dedicatory poem. Walpole had visited Dunrovin, declaring that “nothing in America had so much resembled his native England as this bit of loveliness set in the huge Ridgefield estate of the attorney,” reported The Bridgeport Post in 1937.

When war  broke out in Europe in 1940, Sullivan began turning over the proceeds from the concerts to the Red Cross. The playhouse was also the scene of many special concerts, some benefiting such causes as Danbury Hospital.

Suspended during the war, the festivals resumed in 1946, but ended with Sullivan’s death in 1947 at the age of 63. His opera house was later converted into a residence, which it remains today on Country Club Road.

In the 1940s, Sullivan was often seen on Main Street in the village walking his English sheepdogs; one of the dogs was the gift of his friend, the Duke of Windsor, when he was king of England. A portrait of the duke also hung in the playhouse.

In his will, Sullivan established the William Matheus Sullivan Musical Foundation which, to this day, awards grants to promising musicians to help with their studies. Nearly 500 singers have earned Sullivan Awards, among them Jessye Norman, Jerry Hadley, Kathleen Battle, Renee Fleming, Christine Brewer, Leona Mitchell, Susan Graham, Patricia Racette, and Elizabeth Futral — some of the finest American operatic singers of the 20th and 21st Centuries. 

Sidney Farrar:  

First Baseman and Opera Dad

Sidney Farrar had at least two claims to fame: A daughter and a glove. The Ridgefielder helped create one of the 20th century’s greatest opera stars and played for one of today’s major league baseball teams in its very first years.

Sidney Douglas Farrar was born in 1859 in Paris, Maine. By the 1870s, he was living in Melrose, Mass. where he was working in a box factory and playing semi-professional baseball for a local team. In 1880 he married Henrietta Barnes of Melrose, and two years later, their only child, Geraldine, was born. 

In 1883, Farrar joined the Philadelphia Quakers in the National League for the team’s very first season. A year later, they changed their name to the Philadelphia Phillies,  

The first baseman started seven years with the Phillies and was better known as a good fielder than a strong batter or runner. His last major league season, 1890, was with the Philadelphia Athletics in the short-lived and rebellious Players League. 

Farrar had a lifetime batting average of .253, with 905 hits but only 18 home runs. His best year was 1887 when he hit .282 and scored 83 runs. In 1888, he led the National League in being hit by pitches. In all, he played 943 games as a professional at a salary that ranged from $900 to $2,000 a season ($24,000 to $53,000 in 2016 dollars).

After he left Philadelphia, he played a couple of years of semi-pro ball in New Haven and Providence before retiring completely from the game to, according to The Ridgefield Press, focus on his daughter who showed “unmistakable signs of musical talent.” For a while, he operated a men’s clothing store in Melrose in partnership with Melrose native Frank G. Selee, a Hall of Famer who had managed the Boston Beaneaters (the first major league club to win 100 games in a season) and who later led the Chicago Cubs where, Baseball-Reference.com reports, he “was responsible for assembling the famous Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double play combination.”

One baseball historian reports Farrar eventually sold his interest in the clothing store and borrowed thousands of dollars to help pay for his daughter Geraldine’s singing instruction in Europe.

Geraldine, who became a Metropolitan Opera star, owed not only her education, but at least some of her vocal talents to her parents. Both mom and dad reportedly had fine singing voices and performed a great deal in public, particularly with church choirs. “Farrar was a baritone, and it was said of him that if he was speaking in what, for him, was a conversational tone of voice on one side of a street, he could be clearly heard from the other side,” wrote Charles Paolino, a newspaper editor and historian. 

While still living in Melrose, Farrar ran for selectman of the town. “There was a great drive to defeat him,” The Press reported. “In the southern part of the town, there were some factories and Mr. Farrar had always been a friend of the factory worker. The election progressed throughout the day and at 4:30 in the afternoon, when the factories were let out, 600 men marched to the polls and swept their friend, Mr. Farrar, into office.”

Apparently to be closer to his daughter in New York after his wife died in 1923, Farrar bought a North Salem Road farmhouse and 30 acres from Joseph T. Hubbard,  calling it “Farrar’s Thirty Acres.” 

The Press said he convinced his daughter to move here and in 1924, Geraldine Farrar bought a place on West Lane. She lived in Ridgefield for the rest of her life here.

“In later life, when he had been widowed,” said historian Paolino, “Sid Farrar was a familiar figure at Geraldine’s concerts, and she said that he was often surrounded by other old ballplayers who may have looked a little out of place in the classical concert hall. It dawned on her, she said, that those old guys weren’t there to see her; they were there to see her dad.”

Farrar became active in the community, especially with the Masons, and was elected a director of the Ridgefield Savings Bank. He “was ever a booster of this town,” said his Press obituary in 1935.

 When his estate was probated, his possessions included a 1927 Locomobile sedan and 200 shares of International Telephone and Telegraph stock, then worth about $1,375.

Farrar Lane, off North Salem Road, was named for Sidney Farrar, whose farm bordered the road. The road, which existed long before Farrar moved there,  may be the old southerly end of what is now Mamanasco Road.