Leontyne Price

The door to opera opened through the young medium of TV and the NBC Opera Theatre, under music director Peter Herman Adler. In January 1955,[9] she sang the title role in Puccini's Tosca, the first appearance by an African American in a leading role in televised opera. (Another black soprano, Veronica Tyler, had sung in the chorus for several seasons.) Price went on to star in three other NBC broadcasts--as Pamina in The Magic Flute (1956), Madame Lidoine in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957), and Donna Anna in Don Giovanni (1960). The Tosca was not controversial--Price's appearance had not been widely advertised--and the Jackson, Mississippi, NBC affiliate carried the broadcast. However, Price's later opera broadcasts were boycotted by several NBC affiliates, most of them in the South, because of her race.

In March 1955, she was taken by her agent to audition at Carnegie Hall for the young Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, who was touring with the Berlin Philharmonic. Impressed with her singing of "Pace, pace, mio Dio" from Verdi's La forza del destino, Karajan reportedly leapt to the stage to accompany Price himself. Declaring her "an artist of the future," he asked her managers at Columbia Artists to direct her future European career.

Over the next three seasons, Price continued to give recitals with David Garvey as her pianist. In 1956, she toured India and then, the next year, Australia, giving concerts and recitals. Both tours were under the auspices of the U.S. State Department. On May 3, 1957, she sang Aida in a concert performance at the May Festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in her first public performance of what became her signature role.

External audio
You may hear Leontyne Price performing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem Mass in D minor K. 626 with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Fritz Wunderlich, Eberhhard Wachter, Hilde Rossel-Majdan, Walter Berry in 1960 Here on archive.org

Her grand opera debut occurred in San Francisco on September 20, 1957, as Madame Lidoine in the U.S. premiere of Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites. A few weeks later, Price sang her first staged Aida, substituting at the last minute for Italian soprano Antonietta Stella, who had suffered an appendicitis. Price's European opera debut came in May 1958, as Aida, at the Vienna Staatsoper under Karajan. This was followed in short order by her first appearances at London's Royal Opera House (replacing Anita Cerquetti), and at the Arena di Verona, both as Aida.

The next fall, she sang her first performances of Verdi's Il Trovatore in San Francisco, with the great Swedish tenor Jussi Bjoerling. Then, returning to Vienna, she sang Aida and her first onstage Pamina, and repeated Aida at Covent Garden. Whike in London, she also gave a BBC TV recital of American songs with Gerald Moore and a concert of operatic scenes by Richard Strauss for BBC Radio, conducted by Peter Herman Adler. In Vienna, she made her first full opera recording for RCA, singing Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni under Erich Leinsdorf.

That crowded summer, she made her debut at the Salzburg Festival in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, conducted by Karajan; recorded a second full opera, Verdi'sIl Trovatore for RCA in Rome; then returned to Verona to sing Il Trovatore with tenor Franco Corelli. The Met's general manager Rudolf Bing was at one of the performances and, impressed, went backstage to invite Price and Corelli to make their Met debuts in 1960–61.

That fall, Price made her Chicago Lyric Opera debut as Liu in Turandot with Birgit Nilsson, and sang Massenet's Thais. (Her Liu was well received. Her Thais was considered stiff and mannered.) On May 21, 1960, she sang for the first time at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, again as Aida. The reception was tumultuous and a Milanese critic wrote that "our great Verdi would have found her the ideal Aida." She was the first African American to sing a prima donna role in Italy's greatest opera house. (The African American soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs had sung there two years earlier, in the seconda role of Elvira in Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri.) In Salzburg that summer, Price sang her first Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, under Karajan. She then returned to Vienna to sing Cio-Cio-san in Madama Butterfly.

The Met had been slow to offer Price a major contract. In 1958, Bing had invited her to sing a pair of Aidas, but she turned him down on the advice of Peter Herman Adler and others, who argued that she should wait until she had more repertoire under her belt. Adler warned against arriving in the racially stereotypical role of Aida, an Ethiopian slave. In his autobiography, William Warfield quotes Adler as saying, "Leontyne is to be a great artist. When she makes her debut at the Met, she must do it as a lady, not a slave." Eventually, the Met booked her for five roles in early 1961, Leonora in Il Trovatore for her debut), Aida, Donna Anna, Liu, and Butterfly.

On January 27, 1961, Price and Corelli made a triumphant joint debut in Il Trovatore. The performance ended with an ovation that lasted at least 35 minutes, one of the longest in Met history.[9] (Price said friends had timed it at 42 minutes, and that was the figure she used in her publicity.) In his review, New York Times critic Harold C. 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."

Reviewers were less enthusiastic about Corelli, who was disappointed and told Bing the next day he would never sing with Price again. The outburst was forgotten, and Price and Corelli sang together often, at the Met, the Vienna Staatsoper, in Salzburg, and (once, for Karajan's 'Carmen') in the recording studio.

In recognition of her extraordinary first season at the Met, Time magazine put her on its cover, and ran a profile under the headline, "A voice like a banner flying."

She had achieved an eminence no other African American had reached in opera. After Anderson, three black artists had preceded Price in leading roles at the Met: baritone Robert McFerrin (1955), soprano Gloria Davy (1956), and soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs (1958). However, Price was the first prima donna and box office star, and the first to open a Met season.

The opening almost didn't happen. In September 1961, a musicians' strike threatened to abort the season, and Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg was asked to mediate a settlement. Price received enthusiastic reviews for the opening performance, but during the second performance, she confronted her first vocal crisis. In the middle of the second act, her voice slowly vanished until she was shouting the words at end of the scene. The standby, soprano Dorothy Kirsten, finished the performance. The newspapers said that Price was suffering a viral infection, but stress and the unsuitable weight of the role played their parts.

After several weeks off, Price repeated Fanciulla and then, after a Butterfly in December, which she ended in tears, took a respite in Rome. The official word was that she had never fully recovered from the earlier virus. However, Price later said she was suffering from nervous exhaustion. In April, she returned to the Met for her first Toscas and then joined the Met's spring tour for the first time in Tosca, Butterfly, and Fanciulla.

Recognizing that Price's talent was so extraordinary she would have to be included on the Met tour, creating problems in the segregated South, Bing had declared that the Met would no longer perform to segregated houses, starting in 1962. Price gave the first performance by an African American in a leading role with the company in the South, singing Fanciulla in Dallas. Two years later, she sang Donna Anna in Atlanta, a first leading role for an African American on tour in the Deep South. Both performances occurred without incident.

Consistently a Met box office sell-out in the early years, Price was soon earning a top fee. By 1964, she was paid was $2,750 per performance, on a par with Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas, and Renata Tebaldi, according to the Met archives. Birgit Nilsson, who was unique in singing both Italian and Wagnerian roles, earned a little more, at $3,000 a performance.

While her Met star rose, Price remained active in Vienna, Milan, and Salzburg. She sang a famous Il Trovatore in Salzburg and Tosca and Donna Anna in Vienna, all under Karajan. She was also the soprano soloist in many of Karajan's performances of the Verdi Requiem.

After the first Met season, Price added seven roles to her Met repertoire over the next five years (in chronological order): Elvira in Verdi's Ernani, Pamina in Mozart's The Magic Flute, Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte, Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Amelia in Un ballo in maschera, Cleopatra in Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, and Leonora in La forza del destino.

The next, probably the biggest, and certainly the most troubled milestone in her career was the opening night of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center on September 16, 1966, when she sang Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra by American composer Samuel Barber, a new opera commissioned for the occasion. The composer had written the role especially for Price, often visiting her at home with new pages of the score.

In reviews of the premiere, Price's singing was highly praised. However, the opera was considered a failure by many critics, who found the sequence confusing, the Shakespearean text unintelligible, and director Franco Zeffirelli's production suffocatingly elaborate. Zeffirelli buried Barber's essentially intimate score under giant scenery, innumerable supernumeraries, and two camels. Bing had overreached, too, by scheduling three new productions in the first week in the new house, placing a burden on tech crews who had not yet mastered the equipment and lighting. The chaos of the final rehearsals, along with excerpts of Price's beautiful singing, were captured by cinema verite director Robert Drew in a Bell Telephone Hour documentary, titled "The New Met: Countdown to Curtain". Price later said the experience soured her feelings toward the Met. She began to appear there less often.

Antony and Cleopatra has never been revived at the Met. Barber prepared a concert suite of Cleopatra's arias, which was premiered by Price in Washington, DC, in 1968, and recorded for RCA.

In the late 1960s, Leontyne Price cut back her operatic performances and devoted more of her career to recitals and concerts. She said she was tired, stressed by the racial tensions in the country (and her role as a token of racial progress), and frustrated with the number (and quality) of new productions at the Met. Her recitals and concerts (generally programs of arias with orchestra) were highly successful, and, for the next two decades, she was a mainstay in the major orchestral and concert series in the big American cities and universities.

She knew to keep a presence in opera and returned to the Met and the San Francisco Opera, her favorite house, for short runs of three to five performances, sometimes a year or more apart. However, she undertook only three new roles after 1970: Giorgetta in Puccini's Il tabarro (San Francisco only); Puccini's Manon Lescaut (San Francisco and New York); and Ariadne in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos (San Francisco and New York). And of these only Ariadne was considered as superlative as her established repertoire.

In October 1973, she returned to the Met to sing Madame Butterfly for the first time in a decade. In 1976, she was given a long-promised new production of Aida, with James McCracken as Radames and Marilyn Horne as Amneris, directed by John Dexter.

The following season, she renewed her partnership with Karajan in a performance of Brahms' Requiem, with the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall.

She appeared more rarely in Europe. In the early 1970s, she sang Aida and a single Forzain Hamburg and returned to London's Covent Garden in Trovatore and Aida. She sang more often in recitals, in Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, and at the Salzburg Festival. At the latter she became a special favorite, appearing there in 1975, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981, and 1984.

In the U.S., she had become an iconic figure and was regularly asked to sing on important national occasions. In January 1973, she sang "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" and "Onward, Christian Soldiers" at the state funeral of President Lyndon B. Johnson. (She had sung at his inauguration in 1965.) President Jimmy Carter invited her to sing at the White House for the visit of Pope John Paul II and at the state dinner after the signing of the Camp David Peace Accords. In 1978, Carter invited her to sing a nationally televised recital from the East Room of the White House. In 1982, she sang "Battle Hymn of the Republic" before a Joint Meeting of Congress on the 100th anniversary of the birth of President Franklin Roosevelt. She also sang for Presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton.

In 1977, she made nostalgic returns to Vienna and Salzburg in Il trovatore, in the famous production from 1962, once again under Karajan. The Vienna performances were the first for both at the Staatsoper since 1964, when Karajan had resigned as its director.

That fall, Leontyne Price sang her last new role, and her first Strauss heroine: Ariadne in Ariadne auf Naxos The premiere in San Francisco was considered a great success. When she sang the role at the Met in 1979, she was suffering from a viral infection and had to cancel all but the first and last of eight scheduled performances. Reviewing the first performance, the New York Times critic John Rockwell was not complimentary.[12]

Price, 1981

In the fall of 1981, she had a late triumph in San Francisco when she stepped in for an ailing Margaret Price as Aida, a role she had not sung since 1976. The Radames was Luciano Pavarotti, in his first assumption of the role. Columnist Herbert Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Leontyne had insisted on being paid $1 more than the tenor. That would have made her, for the moment, the highest-paid opera singer in the world. The opera house denied the arrangement.

In 1982, Price returned to the Met as Leonora in Il Trovatore, a role she hadn't sung in the house since 1969. She also sang a televised concert of duets and arias with Marilyn Horne and conductor James Levine, later released on record by RCA. In 1983, she hosted two televised performances of "In Performance from the White House," with President and Mrs. Reagan, and sang the Ballo duet with Pavarotti in the 100th anniversary concert of the Metropolitan Opera.

She had considered her 1982 Met appearances her (unannounced) final opera performances, but the Met persuaded her to return for several Forzas in 1984 and a series of "Aidas" in 1984–1985. Performances of both operas were broadcast in the "Live from the Met" TV series on PBS, her first and only appearances in the series and important documents of two of her greatest roles. Shortly before the last "Aida", on January 3, 1985, word leaked to the press that it was to be her operatic farewell. The performance ended with 25 minutes of applause and the singer's photograph on the front page of the New York Times. The paper's critic Donal Henahan wrote that the "57-year-old soprano took an act or two to warm to her work, but what she delivered in the Nile Scene turned out to be well worth the wait." In 2007, PBS viewers voted her singing of the Act III aria, "O patria mia", as the No. 1 "Great Moment" in 30 years of "Live from the Met" telecasts.[13][5]

In 21 seasons with the Met, Leontyne Price sang 201 performances, in 16 roles, in the house and on tour. (After her debut in 1961, she was absent for three seasons—1970-71, 1977–78, and 1980-81; and sang only in galas in 1972–73, 1979–80, and 1982–83.)

Price in 1995

For the next dozen years, she continued to perform concerts and recitals in the U.S. Her recital programs, arranged by her longtime accompanist David Garvey, usually combined Handel arias or arie antiche, Lieder by Schumann and Leo Marx, an operatic aria or two, followed by French melodies, a group of American art songs by Barber, Ned Rorem, and Lee Hoiby, and spirituals. She liked to end her encores with "This Little Light of Mine", which she said was her mother's favorite spiritual.

Over time, Price's voice became darker and heavier, but the upper register held up extraordinarily well and her conviction and sheer delight in singing always spilled over the footlights. On November 19, 1997, she sang a recital at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that was her unannounced last.

In her later years, Price gave master classes at Juilliard and other schools. In 1997, at the suggestion of RCA Victor, she wrote a children's book version of Aida, which became the basis for the hit Broadway musical by Elton John and Tim Rice in 2000.

Price avoided the term African American, preferring to call herself an American, even a "chauvinistic American". She 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."[14]

On September 30, 2001,[9] at the age of 74, Price was asked to come out of retirement to sing in a memorial concert at Carnegie Hall for the 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", ending it with a bright, easy B-flat below high C.[15]

In 2017, the age of 90, she appeared in Susan Froemke's The Opera House, a documentary about the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center in 1966.[16]

• 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).
• LaBlanc, Michael L. LaBlanc (1992). Contemporary Black biography. profiles from the international Black community. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Inc. ISBN 9781414435299.
• Luciano Pavarotti with William Wright, Pavarotti, My Own Story (Doubleday, 1981), ISBN 978-0-385-15340-9
• Lyon, Hugh Lee (2006). Leontyne Price: Highlights of a Prima Donna. New York: Authors Choice Press.
• 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).
• Rosalyn M. Story, "And So I Sing:"African American Divas of Opera and Concert" (Amistad, 1990).
• Robert Vaughan, Herbert von Karajan (W.W. Norton & Company, 1986).
• Galina Vishnevskaya, Galina, A Russian Story (Harvest/HBJ Book, 1985).
• Ward Plowden, Martha (2002). Famous Firsts of Black Women (2nd ed.). Gretna, La.: Pelican Pub. Co. ISBN 1565541979.
• William Warfield, with Alton Miller, William Warfield: My Music and My Life (Sagamore Publishing, 1991).

• Blier, Stephen (October 1996). "Time After Time". Opera News. 61 (4).
• Jackson, Robert (July 1985). "Collard Greens and Caviar". Opera News. 48 (1).
• Myers, Eric (March 2006). "Reunion: Justino Diaz". Opera News. 70 (9).
• Perkins, David (October 5, 1986). "The Garbo of Opera". News and Observer. Raleigh, North Carolina.
• "Leontyne Price, Ill, To Rest for Month". The New York Times. December 23, 1961.
• "The Nation: Where Atlanta's 'Big Mules' Relax". Time. January 10, 1977. on 1964 Don Giovanni controversy