Mary Violet Leontyne Price (born February 10, 1927) is an American opera singer (soprano). She was best known for her Verdi roles, above all Aida. An African American born in the segregated South, she rose to international fame in the 1950s and 60s, and became the first black "superstar" at the once-segregated Metropolitan Opera. For almost 40 years, she was one of America's most beloved and widely recorded sopranos.

Price was a leading interpreter of the lirico spinto (Italian for "pushed lyric", or middleweight) roles of Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, as well as of roles in several operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Her voice ranged from A flat below Middle C to the E above High C. (She said she sang high Fs "in the shower.")

She is a quotable woman whose many bon mots have entered opera lore. Once, when discussing whether she would sing in Atlanta as Minnie, the cowgirl lead in Puccini's La Fanciulla del West, the Met's general manager Rudolf Bing warned her she wouldn't be able to stay in the same segregated hotel with the company. She looked at him and said, "Don't worry, Mr. Bing, I'm sure you can find a place for me and the horse."

After her retirement from the opera stage in 1985, she gave recitals for another dozen years. Among her many honors are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1965), the Kennedy Center Honors (1980), the National Medal of Arts (1985), numerous honorary degrees, and nineteen Grammy Awards, including a special Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, more than any other classical singer. In 2005, American talk show host Oprah Winfrey honored Price and 24 other influential African-American women at a Legends Ball.

Life and career

Roots

Leontyne Price was born in a black neighborhood of Laurel, Mississippi. Her father worked in a lumber mill and her mother was a midwife with a rich singing voice. They had waited 13 years for a child, and Leontyne became the focus of intense pride and love. She began piano lessons at three and a half with Mrs. H.V. McInnis, a teacher at the colored high school. Later her parents traded in the family phonograph as the down payment on an upright piano. At 10, she heard Marian Anderson sing in Jackson, a decisive influence. In her teen years, Leontyne accompanied the "second choir" at St. Paul's Methodist Church while singing and playing for the chorus at the black high school. Meanwhile, she often visited the home of Alexander and Elizabeth Chisholm, an affluent white family in whose household Leontyne's aunt worked as a maid. Mrs. Chisholm encouraged the girl's early piano playing, and later noticed her extraordinary singing voice. Aiming for a teaching career, Price enrolled in the music education program at Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio. Her success in the glee club led to solo assignments, and she completed her studies in voice. With the help of the Chisholms and the famous bass Paul Robeson, who sang a benefit concert, she enrolled as a scholarship student at the Juilliard School in New York City, where she studied with Florence Page Kimball.

Her first important stage performances were as Mistress Ford in a 1952 student production in Verdi's Falstaff. Shortly thereafter, Virgil Thomson hired her for the revival of his all-black opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. After a two-week Broadway run, Saints went to Paris. Meanwhile, she had been cast as Bess in the Blevins Davis/Robert Breen revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and returned for the opening of the national tour at the Dallas State Fair, on June 9, 1952. The tour visited Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C, and then went on a tour of Europe, sponsored by the U.S. State Department. After stops in Vienna, Berlin, London and Paris, the company returned to New York when Broadway's Ziegfield Theater became available for a "surprise" run.

Meanwhile, on the eve of the European tour, Price had married the man who had sung Porgy, the noted bass-baritone William Warfield, at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, with many in the cast in attendance. In his memoirs My Music and My Life, Warfield describes how their careers forced them apart. (They were legally separated in 1967, and divorced in 1973. They had no children.)

At first, Price had aimed for a recital career, in the footsteps of contralto Marian Anderson, tenor Roland Hayes, Warfield, and other great black singers to whom American opera houses were closed. Granted leaves from "Porgy" to sing concerts, she championed new works by American composers, including Lou Harrison, John La Montaine, and Samuel Barber.

Opera proved a stronger calling. The music-drama art form had fascinated her since Juilliard (a Met performance of Ljuba Welitsch as Salome was inspiring first exposure), and her success as Bess had proved she had the instincts and the voice for the big stage. The Met itself acknowledged this when it invited her to sing "Summertime" at a "Met Jamboree" fund-raiser on April 6, 1953, at the Ritz Theater on Broadway. Thus Price was the first African American to sing with the Met and for the Met, if not at the Met. That distinction went to Marian Anderson, who, on January 7, 1955, sang Ulrica in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. The occasion was important, but the role was small, racially typecast (Ulrica is specified in the libretto as a Negress), and came late in Anderson's career. The question was, When would a young black soprano make a career in leading roles?

Emergence

In 1955, Price was engaged by NBC-TV Opera to sing in an English-language performance of Giacomo Puccini's Tosca, under the NBC company's music director Peter Herman Adler. This was the first appearance by a black in televised opera, and several Southern NBC affiliates canceled the broadcast. A videotape at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City shows an attractive young soprano with a natural acting style, immaculate English enunciation, and easy, shining top notes.

Later that year, she auditioned at Carnegie Hall for the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, who was in New York on his first tour with the Berlin Philharmonic. Declaring her "an artist of the future," he invited her to sing Salome at La Scala. (She wisely declined.) In 1956 and 1957, Price made recital tours to India and Australia, sponsored by the U. S. State Department.

Her opera house debut was in San Francisco on September 20, 1957, as Madame Lidoine in the U.S. premiere of Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites. A few weeks later, she sang her first staged Aida. Meanwhile, von Karajan, who had become intendant of the Vienna Staatsoper, invited her to make her European debut with him as Aida on May 24, 1958. The next year, she returned to Vienna as Aida and Pamina in Die Zauberflöte.

Over the next decade, Karajan conducted Price in some of her greatest performances, in the opera house (in Mozart's Don Giovanni, Verdi's Il Trovatore and Puccini's Tosca), the concert hall (Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Bruckner's Te Deum, and the Verdi Requiem ), and the recording studio, where they produced complete recordings of Tosca and Carmen, and a popular holiday music album A Christmas Offering. All are available on CD.

In the late 1950s, Price continued a string of triumphant European debuts, appearing as Aida at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the Arena di Verona, both in 1958. On May 21, 1960, she sang at La Scala, again as Aida. (Mattiwilda Dobbs had been the first African American to sing there, in 1953, as Elvira in Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri.)

Arrival

On January 27, 1961, Price arrived at the Met, in a co-debut with the Italian tenor Franco Corelli that ended in a 42-minute ovation. Most of the applause was for Price. The next day, New York Times critic Harold Schonberg wrote that Price's "voice, warm and luscious, has enough volume to fill the house with ease, and she has a good technique to back up the voice itself. She even took the trills as written, and nothing in the part as Verdi wrote it gave her the least bit of trouble. She moves well and is a competent actress. But no soprano makes a career of acting. Voice is what counts, and voice is what Miss Price has." He had less to say about Corelli, who, disappointed by his reception, said afterwards he would never sing with Price again. (He did.)



As Corelli may not have understood, there were political overtones to Price's debut. The Civil Rights movement was moving into a more active phase, and friends and movement sympathizers had traveled to New York from the South to cheer her on.

She was not the first African American to sing leading roles at the Met. Since Marian Anderson's debut in 1955, four other black singers had preceded her: Robert McFerrin, a baritone and father of popular singer Bobby McFerrin, sang Amonasro in Aida in 1955 and Rigoletto the next season; the soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs sang Gilda (with Leonard Warren) in 1956; that year, the dancer Geoffrey Holder performed in the Aida ballet sequence; in 1958, soprano Gloria Davy sang Aida, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, and, the next year, Nedda in Pagliacci; also in 1959, the soprano Martina Arroyo sang the offstage Celestial Voice in Don Carlo.

Nevertheless, Price was the first African American to sing multiple leading roles to acclaim in the leading opera houses, at home and abroad. She was also the first to earn the Met's top fee. A 1964 memo revealed that she was paid $2,750 per performance, on a par with Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi. Birgit Nilsson, who had Wagner roles more or less to herself, earned a little more, $3,000. And in October 1961, she became the first African American to open a Met season, a sign of prima donna status.

Price's timing had been carefully judged. Bing in 1958 he had invited her to the sing a single Aida, but she had turned him down, according to Warfield, on the advice of Peter Herman Adler, director of NBC Opera. "Leontyne is to be a great artist," Adler said, according to Warfield. "When she makes her debut at the Met, she must do it as a lady, not a slave." As a result, Price arrived at the Met three years later, with several roles already tested, a large European reputation, and several recordings out for RCA Victor. She was put on the cover of Time magazine. After her arrival, many other African-American singers went on to make world careers, including Arroyo, Shirley Verrett, Grace Bumbry, Jessye Norman, and Kathleen Battle.

Met career

Over the next 24 years, Price sang in 201 Met performances, in 16 different roles, in 21 seasons, at the house and on tour, including galas. (She was absent for three, 1970-71, 1977-78, 1980-81, and sang only in galas in 1972-73, 1979-80, and 1982-83.) In her ambitious first season, she sang five roles: the Trovatore Leonora, Aida, Liù in Turandot, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, and Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly. THe next season, she added two more, Minnie in La Fanciulla del West and Tosca. When a musicians' strike threatened to delay the opening of the 1961-2 season, Price appealed to President Kennedy, asking him to send Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to mediate. The strike was settled, and the Met opened on time with Fanciulla.

Midway in the second performance, however, she had another crisis: She lost her singing voice and chose to shout her lines through to the end of the scene, while tenor Richard Tucker comforted her. Soprano Dorothy Kirsten was called in to sing the third Act. The cause of the lapse seems to have been a virus--and overwork. Others said that Minnie was too heavy a part for Price's essentially lyric voice.

From 1963-67, Price added six more roles at the Met (listed in order): Elvira in Verdi's Ernani, Pamina in Mozart's Zauberflöte, Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte, Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera and Leonora in La Forza del Destino. She proved herself best suited to the "middle period" Verdi roles, with their high lines and postures of noble grief and supplication. They (and the Requiem) became her core repertoire.

Antony and Cleopatra

Another career milestone came on September 16, 1966, when Price sang Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra by American composer Samuel Barber, commissioned to open the Met's new house at Lincoln Center. Since the success of "Hermit Songs" in 1954, Price and Barber had remained friends and frequent collaborators. Barber had asked Price to sing the soprano solo in his Prayers of Kierkegaard, in its U.S. premiere in 1959. For the new opera, Barber said he tailored "every vowel" of Cleopatra's music to Price's voice, and often carried pages of fresh music to her home.

It was not a success. Many felt that director Franco Zeffirelli buried the music under a multitude of extras and animals, floating steel clouds, and a rotating Sphinx. Others blamed the technical challenges of moving into a new high-tech house. At the dress rehearsal, the expensive new turntable broke down, and on opening night Price was briefly trapped inside a pyramid. Others felt that Barber's score was weak, lacking dramatic focus and satisfying set pieces, other than Cleopatra's death scene, a certified winner. The opera ran for eight performances, and was never revived at the Met. However, Barber reworked it for successful productions at Juilliard and the Spoleto festival (Charleston, S.C.), and Price often sang a concert suite, prepared for her by Barber, of Cleopatra's arias.

Late opera career

In the 1970s, Price cut back on opera appearances in favor of recitals and concerts. She explained she needed to recharge her batteries, to avoid overexposure, and hinted at frustration with the number (and quality) of new productions at the Met. After a new "Aida" planned for 1969 was postponed, she told Bing she wanted a break and did not appear the next season, and limited her Met engagements to no more than a handful each season. It is possible that she also needed time-off to adjust to the natural changes in her aging vocal instrument.

After 1970, she added three new roles: Giorgetta in Puccini's Il Tabarro (in San Francisco), Puccini's Manon Lescaut, and Ariadne in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos (in both San Francisco and New York). In January 1973 she sang Onward, Christian Soldiers at the state funeral of President Lyndon Johnson. In October, she sang her first Butterfly in a decade, and earned a half-hour ovation at the Met, and returned to acclaim that spring as Donna Anna. In 1976, she sang Aida, in the long delayed new Met production, with Marilyn Horne as Amneris, (directed by John Dexter). The next year, she renewed her partnership with von Karajan, singing the Brahms Requiem with the Berlin Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall, and then Il Trovatore in Salzburg and Vienna.

In 1977, Price sang her last new role--Strauss' Ariadne--in San Francisco, to enthusiastic reviews. When she sang the role at the Met in 1979, she had a virus infection; she canceled the first and last of three scheduled performances, and the Times reviewer didn't have much good to say about the second.

In a late-career triumph in 1981, Price stepped in at the last minute for an ailing colleague (the Welsh soprano Margaret Price) to sing Aida in San Francisco, with Pavarotti as Radames. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herbert Caen reported that she had insisted on being paid $1 more than the tenor. which would have made her, for the moment, the highest paid opera singer in the world. The opera house denied this.

After revisiting several roles in San Francisco (Forza, Carmélites, Il Trovatore, and more Aidas), and the Met ("Forza" and "Il Trovatore"), Price gave her last operatic performance on January 3, 1985, in an Aida from the Met (her 41st there) that was nationally telecast on PBS. After taking "an act or two to warm up," wrote the "Times" chief critic Donal Henahan, she produced "pearls beyond price," notably the Act III aria, "O patria mia," which received a three-minute ovation, and the duet, "La tra la foreste vergine."

Another Times critic, John Rockwell, wrote more harshly on Dec. 21, after the first performance in the run: "The 'O patria mia' in the third act and the final duet had many of the opulent vocal characteristics that distinguished Miss Price in her prime. Unfortunately, they also had many of the self-indulgent vocal mannerisms, the stolid acting and the hoarse lower register with its rough linkage to the top that also marked her operatic prime." (Excerpts have been posted on YouTube.com.)

Sunset

For the next dozen years, she concentrated on concerts and recitals. Her recital programs, chosen with her longtime accompanist David Garvey, combined French mélodies, German Lieder, Spirituals, an or two, and a group of American art songs, many of them written for her, by composers including Barber, Ned Rorem and Lee Hoiby. In addition to regular stops in the major American cities and university concert series, Price gave recitals in Vienna, Paris, and regularly at the Salzburg Festival (1975, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981, and 1984).

In her later years, Price's voice became darker and heavier, but the upper register held up remarkably well, and the conviction and joy in her singing spilled over the footlights to the sustained applause of sold-out houses. On November 19, 1997, when she was a few months shy of 71, she gave a recital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that turned out to be her last.

Price avoided the term African American, preferring to call herself an American, even a "chauvinistic American." She once summed up her philosophy thus: "If you are going to think black, think positive about it. Don't think down on it, or think it is something in your way. And this way, when you really do want to stretch out, and express how beautiful black is, everybody will hear you."

Price continued to teach master classes at Juilliard and other schools. In 1997, she wrote a children's book version of Aida, which became the basis for a hit Broadway musical by Elton John and Tim Rice in 2000. She lives in Greenwich Village in New York City.

In October 2001, at age 74, Price came out of retirement to sing in a memorial concert in Carnegie Hall for victims of the September 11 attacks. With James Levine at the piano, she sang a favorite spiritual, "This Little Light of Mine," followed by an unaccompanied "God Bless America," capping the anthem with a perfectly placed high B-flat.

Recordings

Leontyne Price's many commercial recordings include three complete sets of Il rovatore, two of Forza, two of Aïda, two of Verdi's Requiem, two of Tosca, and an Ernani, Ballo, Carmen, Madama Butterfly, Cosí Fan Tutte, Don Giovanni (as Donna Elvira), Il Tabarro and (her final complete opera recording) Ariadne auf Naxos. She recorded highlights from "Porgy and Bess" (including music for the other female leads Clara and Serena) with Warfield, under Skitch Henderson. She also recorded five "Prima Donna" albums of selected arias that she never performed in staged productions, two collections of Strauss arias, recitals of French and German art songs, two albums of Spirituals, and a single crossover disc, Right as the Rain, with Andre Previn. Her Barber recordings, including the "Hermit Songs," scenes from Antony and Cleopatra, and "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," appeared on CD under "Leontyne Price Sings Barber." Perhaps her best operatic collection was her first, titled simply "Leontyne Price," and often referred to as the "blue album." It has been re-released often on CD.

In 1996, to honor her 70th birthday, RCA-BMG brought out a deluxe 11-CD box of selections from her recordings, with an accompanying book, titled "The Essential Leontyne Price." Copies are hard to find; one was recently sold on EBay for $650. Meanwhile, historical recordings occasionally appear. In 2002, RCA found a tape of her 1965 Carnegie Hall recital debut and released it in its "Rediscovered" series. In 2005, Bridge Records released her 1954 Library of Congress recital, including the "Hermit Songs," and Henri Sauguet's song-cycle "La Voyante," and songs by Poulenc.

Reputation

In his 1974 history of vocal recordings, "The Grand Tradition," the British critic J.B. Steane writes that "one might conclude from recordings that [Price] is the best interpreter of Verdi of the [20th] century." In her autobiography, the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya wrote that a Price performance of Tosca at the Vienna State Opera "left me with the strongest impression I have ever gotten from opera." In his 1983 autobiography, Plácido Domingo writes, "The power and sensuousness of Leontyne's voice were phenomenal--the most beautiful Verdi soprano I have ever heard."

She has also had her critics. Peter G. Davis writes in his book, "The American Opera Singer," that Price had "a fabulous vocal gift that went largely unfulfilled," noting her reluctance to try new roles, criticizing her Tosca for its lack of a "working chest register," and her late Aidas for a "swooping" vocal line. Others have criticized her stiff technique in florid music, and her occasional mannerisms.

In mid-career, her voice became darker and her vocal style stiffer, disrupted by occasional outbreaks of self-indulgent emphasis, including scooping or swooping up to high notes. Von Karajan took her to task for these in rehearsals in 1977 for "Il Trovatore," as Price herself related in an interview in Diva, by Helena Matheopoulos. As later recordings and appearances show, she took his advice to heart and sang with a cleaner line.

Her acting, too, varied over a long career. Her Bess was praised for its fire and sensuality and her early NBC productions show her moving naturally on camera. Later, she became a stiff, even at times an awkward singer-actress. She herself once said, "I don't expect to win any Academy Awards." In a 1982 "Live from the Met" TV broadcast of "Forza," available on DVD--the only film of Price in a complete opera --she carries herself with compelling dignity.

In March 2007, BBC Music magazine published a list of the "20 All-time Best Sopranos" based on a poll of 21 British music critics and BBC presenters. Leontyne Price placed fourth, after, in order, Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland, and Victoria de los Angeles. Naturally, the list was widely criticized.

Resources

BOOKS

• Sir Rudolf Bing, 5,000 Nights at the Opera: The Memoirs of Sir Rudolf Bing (Doubleday, 1972).
• Peter G. Davis, The American Opera Singer: The Lives and Adventures of America's Great Singers in Opera and Concert from 1825 to the Present (Anchor, 1999).
• Plácido Domingo, My First Forty Years (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).
• Peter G. Davis, The American Opera Singer (Doubleday, 1997).
• Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber, The Composer and His Music (Oxford University Press, 1992).
• Helena Matheopolous, Diva: Sopranos and Mezzo-sopranos Discuss Their Art (Northeastern University Press, 1992).
• Luciano Pavarotti with William Wright, Pavarotti: My Own Story (Doubleday, 1981).
• Stephen Rubin, The New Met (MacMillan, 1974).
• Winthrop Sargeant, Divas (Coward, McCann, Geohegan, 1973).
• J.B. Steane, The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record (Timber Press, 1993).
• Robert Vaughan, Herbert von Karajan (W.W. Norton & Company, 1986).
• Galina Vishneyskaya, Galina, A Russian Story (Harvest/HBJ Book, 1985).
• William Warfield, with Alton Miller, William Warfield: My Music and My Life (Sagamore Publishing, 1991).

ARTICLES

• "From Collard Greens to Caviar: Leontyne Price Reminisces," Opera News, July and August 1985.
• "Reunion: Justino Diaz," by Eric Myers, Opera News, March 2006, Vol. 70, No. 9
• "Time After Time," Stephen Blier reviews "The Essential Leontyne Price" CD collection, Opera News, October 1996
• "The Garbo of Opera," by David Perkins, News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), October 5, 1986
• "Leontyne Price Ill, To Rest for Month," New York Times, December 23, 1961
• "Where Atlanta's 'Big Mules' Relax," Time, Jan. 10 1977 (on 1964 "Don Giovanni" controversy)

External links

• Metropolitan Opera Archives Database.
• Leontyne Price "Voice of the Century" Extensive fan site.
• Profile on Afrovoices.com