Leontyne Price
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Mary Violet Leontyne Price (b. February 10, 1927) is an opera singer (soprano). She was best known for her Verdi roles, above all Aida, a role that she is said to have "owned" for almost 30 years. Her rise to international fame was one of several breakthroughs by African Americans in the 1960s, and a high water mark for American classical singing. In a generation of great singers that included Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland, Birgit Nilsson and Monserrat Caballe, Price was a true lyrico-spinto soprano, notable for her rich, plangent, emotionally vibrant sound.
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 musical talent showed itself early and her parents traded in the family phonograph for a small piano for her to play. An affluent white family in Laurel, the Chisholms, encouraged the young girl and often [employed? implored?] her to sing at family events. Aiming for a teaching career, Price enrolled in the music education program at Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio, but her singing took off and she completed her studies in voice. With the help of the famous bass Paul Robeson and the Chisholms, she obtained a scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York City, where she became the prize pupil of the famous teacher Florence Page Kimball.
Leontyne Price sang Mistress Ford in a student production of Verdi's Falstaff. Impressed by that performance, the composer and critic Virgil Thomson hired her for a revival of his opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, which ran on Broadway for three weeks in April 1952. Price's first public acclaim came as Bess in the 1954 Blevins Davis/Robert Breen revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Starting in Dallas, the production toured the U.S. and Europe, and finally returned for a run on Broadway. After the international leg of the tour, Price and baritone William Warfield, who had sung Porgy to her Bess, were married at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. (They were divorced in 1972.)
In 1955, Price was engaged by NBC TV Opera to sing in an English-language performance of Giacomo Puccini's Tosca. The casting of a black singer, a first on TV, was controversial and several NBC affiliates canceled the broadcast, but Price was a success. A CD reveals a young soprano with a fluttery vibrato, elegant English diction, and the shining top register that would be one of her hallmarks.
Two years later, Leontyne Price made her professional operatic debut as Madame Lidoine in the American premiere of Dialogues at the San Francisco Opera. In 1958, she had a hastily arranged audition at Carnegie Hall for Herbert von Karajan, and was invited to make her first European operatic appearance at the Vienna State Opera, as Pamina in "The Magic Flute," followed by Aida. Price and von Karajan became frequent collaborators, in the opera house (most famously in 1962 Salzburg performances of Verdi's Il Trovatore), concert hall (in Verdi's, Mozart's and Brahms' Requiems and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis), and in the studio, where they made still popular recordings of Tosca and Carmen, and one of the most popular holiday albums, A Christmas Offering. (All have been reissued on CD.)
On July 2, 1958, Price made her debut at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as Aida. Two years later, on May 21, 1960, again as Aida, she appeared at La Scala, becoming the first black singer to sing a leading role in the historic home of Italian opera.
She completed her royal progress of debuts on January 27, 1961 with her first performances at the Metropolitan Opera (Met) as Leonora in Verdi's Il Trovatore. The Italian tenor Franco Corelli was also making his Met debut, and the performance ended with a 42-minute ovation. The next day, 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." According to Bing's memoirs, Corelli was so furious that Price received the lion's share of the publicity, he had to be entreated to come out of his hotel room.
There was good reason for the fuss, beyond the vocal excellence. The contralto Marian Anderson had broken the race barrier when she was invited to sing at the Met in 1955, and several other black artists had sung leading roles there, including Robert McFerrin, the baritone and father of popular singer Bobby McFerrin, and Mattiwillda Dobbs. but Leontyne Price was the first African-American singer to sing leading roles abroad and at home. She had been invited by Bing earlier to sing a single performance of Aida, and she took friends' advice that she not arrive in a stereotypically black role. Instead, she came to the Met a mature artist, with a huge reputation, and was prepared to sing seven roles in her first two seasons. Following her, many African-American singers made world careers, including Martina Arroyo, Shirley Verrett, Grace Bumbry, Jessye Norman, and Kathleen Battle.
In 24 seasons at the Met, Price sang 201 performances (including tours) in 16 roles, including Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni, Fiordiligi in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Minnie (a role she abandoned as too heavy after a few performances in 1962), and Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly. The critics and public agreed, however, that the music that best suited Price's voice an personality was Verdi's, notably the five "middle period" roles of Aida, the Leonoras of Il Trovatore and La Forza del Destino, Elvira in Ernani, and Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera.
Among her career milestones, Price opened the Met's new house at Lincoln Center in 1966 in the world premiere of "Antony and Cleopatra" by American composer Samuel Barber. The event was not a success. The production by director Franco Zeffirelli (who was also the librettist) was overdone and one reviewer said Price's costumes made her look "like Sitting Bull." On the opening night, the stage turntable broke down, trapping her inside a pyramid in the middle of a costume change. Critics said Barber's score was uninteresting when in fact it was overwhelmed. Barber revised it a few years later, with the help of Gian Carlo Menotti, and the opera has been revived in Chicago and Charleston, S.C., and in concert at Carnegie Hall in 2004. Barber and Price had an long, fruitful musical friendship. She had premiered his "Hermit Songs" in 1954 at the Library of Congress, with Barber at the piano. She sang in the Boston premiere of "Prayers of Kierkegaard" in 1957. And, in 1969, she premiered the song cycle, "Despite and Still," which Barber dedicated to her.
In the 1970s and 80s, Price cut back on opera. She added three new roles, Giorgietta in "Il Tabarro," Manon Lescaut in Puccini's opera, and Ariadne in Strauss' "Ariadne auf Naxos." In 1977, she returned to the Salzburg Festival and the Vienna Staatsoper to sing "Trovatore" with Von Karajan, revisiting their earlier triumphs. In 1978, she sang a televised recital from the White House, at the invitation of President Jimmy Carter. In 1982, she sang Aida once again, stepping in for an indisposed Margaret Price, at the San Francisco Opera. (This triumphant evening was her only opera appearance with the tenor Luciano Pavarotti, the Radames. Reportedly, Price insisted that she be paid $1 more, making her, at least for that moment, the world's highest paid opera singer. The Opera House denied this.) In 1985, Price bade farewell to opera from the Met in a nationally telecast "Aida."
Her busy and happy recital career continued. Her programs typically combined French melodies, German lieder, Spirituals, an aria or two, and American art songs, often written for her, by Barber, Ned Rorem and Lee Hoiby. In 1982, she sang for the Daughters of the American Revolution at Constition Hall in Washington, D.C., in a symbolic reparation for the DAR's exclusion of contralto Marian Anderson from the same venue in 1940. Price's voice became somewhat heavy and effortful in her later years, but the upper register held up exceptionally well, and she always sang with total conviction and effervescent joy, and was rewarded with long, affectionate ovations from full houses. On November 19, 1997, when she was 70, she gave a recital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that turned out to be her last.
During her career, Price won 19 Grammys for her many recordings, including a special Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1989. Her first aria recital album, the so-called "blue album," made in 1960, has been reissued several times on CD and reflects the spontaneity, effortless production, and warm tone of her early singing.
She continues to teach master classes at Juilliard and other schools. In 1997, Price published a children's book version of "Aida," which became the basis for a hit Broadway musical by Elton John and Tim Rice in 2000.
In September 2001, at age 74, Leontyne Price came out of retirement to sing God Bless America and a spiritual, This Little Light of Mine, in a Carnegie Hall memorial concert for victims of the World Trade Center attacks. She lives in Greenwich Village in New York City.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leontyne_Price
