Leontyne Price
The soprano Mary Violet Leontyne Price (born February 10, 1927) is an African American opera singer. She was best known for her Verdi roles, above all Aida, a role with which she became more closely associated than any other singer of the postwar period. Her rise to international fame was one of several highly visible breakthroughs by African Americans in the 1960s, and indeed represented a high point for American classical singing on the world's stages.
Price was born in a segregated black neighborhood of Laurel, Mississippi. Her father worked in a lumber mill and her mother was a midwife with a rich singing voice. Leontyne's talent was noticed early and her parents traded the family phonograph for a small piano for her. An affluent white family in Laurel, the Chisholms, encouraged her studies as well, and often asked her to sing at family events. Aiming for a teaching career, she enrolled in the music education program at Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio, on a scholarship, but found herself drawn to singing, and completed her studies in voice. With the help of the great bass Paul Robeson and the Chisholms, she obtained a scholarship to study at the Juilliard School in New York City, where she became a prized pupil of Florence Page Kimball.
Price's first opera performance was as Mistress Quickly in a Juilliard production of Verdi's Falstaff. Composer Virgil Thomson, who heard that performance, hired her immediately to sing in a revival of his opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. Her first national acclaim came as Bess in a successful 1954 Broadway and international revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The Porgy was the baritone William Warfield. After the long run, Warfield and Price were married. (They were divorced in 1972.)
In 1955, NBC TV Opera engaged Price to sing Giacomo Puccini's Tosca. The idea of casting a black singer in a white role prompted controversy -- and some NBC affiliates canceled the broadcast -- but the soprano's performance was a critical success.
Her professional operatic stage debut came in 1957 at the San Francisco Opera as Madame Lidoine in the U.S. premiere of Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites. In 1958, she was invited by Herbert von Karajan to make her first European operatic appearance, as Aida, at the Vienna State Opera. Price and von Karajan continued to work together, in the opera house (most famously in 1962 Salzburg performances of Verdi's Il Trovatore), concert hall (notably in Verdi's Requiem), and on famous recordings of Tosca, Carmen, and a popular holiday album, "A Christmas Offering".
On July 2, 1958, Price made her debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Her first appearance at Milan's Teatro alla Scala came two years later, on May 21, 1960, again as Aida. Price was the first black singer to sing a leading role in the historic home of Italian opera.
On January 27, 1961, she crowned this royal progress with her first performances at the Metropolitan Opera as Leonora in Verdi's Il Trovatore. Some considered this a bit late. Rudolf Bing, the Met's general manager, had offered her "Aida" earlier, but she refused to arrive in a stereotypical black role. The performance also marked the debut of Italian tenor Franco Corelli, and ended in a 42-minute ovation. In the New York Times, critic Harold Schonberg wrote: "[Price's] voice was dusky and rich in its lower tones, perfectly even in its transitions from one register to another, and flawlessly pure and velvety at the top." Several black artists had sung at the Met after the contralto Marian Anderson broke the race barrier there, at Bing's invitation, on January 7, 1955, but Price was the first African-American opera singer to be acclaimed abroad and at home.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Price went on to sing a dozen roles at the Met, including Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni, Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Cio-Cio-San in Puccini's Madama Butterfly, and Ariadne in Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos. When the Met's opened its new house at Lincoln Center in 1966, Price sang Cleopatra in the premiere of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, which Barber had written with her voice in mind.
Price's is best remembered for her Verdi heroines, whose soaring lines and passionate utterances suited her voice and personality, including Leonora in La Forza del Destino and Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera. Her operatic farewell came in 1985 at the Met, as Aida. She continued to give recitals that combined American art songs (including many written for her by Samuel Barber, Ned Rorem and Lee Hoiby), French melodies, German lieder, Spirituals, and operatic excerpts.
In September 2001, Leontyne Price came out of retirement to sing in a Carnegie Hall memorial concert for victims of the World Trade Center attacks. She lives in Greenwich Village in New York City.
External links
- Leontyne Price "Voice of the Century" Extensive fan site.
- Profile on Afrovoices.com