Youth and schooling

Mary Violet Leontyne Price was born in Laurel, Mississippi on February 10, 1927.^[5][3] Her father James Anthony worked as a carpenter and her mother Katherine Baker Price was a midwife.^[5] A deeply religious family, both of her parents were children of Methodist ministers;^[1] her mother sang as a soloist in the church choir and her father played a tuba in the church band.^[6] Her brother and only sibling, George, was born two years later.^[5] She showed a natural affinity for music at an early age and began piano lessons at the age of three and a half with the local pianist Hattie McInnis.^[7] Initially, she played on a toy piano, but by the time she was five, her parents traded in the family phonograph as the down payment on an upright piano.^[7] Meanwhile, at age eight, she had begun visiting the home of Alexander and Elizabeth Chisholm, a wealthy white family for whom Leontyne's aunt worked as a laundress.^[8] Leontyne and George became good friends with the Chisholms' older daughters, Jean and Peggy, and Mrs. Chisholm encouraged Leontyne's piano-playing and singing, often inviting her to sing at house parties.^[7] Aged 9, she was taken on a school trip to hear Marian Anderson sing a recital in Jackson. The experience was her first significant exposure to classical music, and she later recalled that "The whole aura of the occasion had a tremendous effect on me, particularly the singer's dignity and, of course, her voice".^[6] Multiple commentators asserted that this event galvanized Price's interest in a musical career.^[2][1][6] In her teen years, Price attended Oak Park Vocational High School, where she was a cheerleader and salutatorian.^[7] She earned extra money by singing for funerals and civic functions.^[7]

Price in 1951

Mississippi was highly segregated at the time, and subject to Jim Crow laws.^[2] As such, as a black woman, the only evident musical career path was as a teacher.^[1] She began her study in music education at Central State University, a historically black school in Wilberforce, Ohio.^[9] However, on the advice of the university president^[7] and after frequent singing in a glee club she changed her major to voice in her third year.^[10] She also participated in master classes, including one in 1948 with the renowned bass Paul Robeson at Antioch College.^[7] Robeson was impressed by Price's voice, and—knowing she was aiming to enroll at Juilliard—worked with the Central State administrators to host a benefit concert to help raise money for her tuition.^[7] The Chisholms also remained supportive of Price, and gifted the bulk of the money needed for Juilliard.^[7]

Price entered the studio of Florence Page Kimball in the fall of 1948.^[9] While studying at the Juilliard that year, she lived in the Harlem YWCA, which was safe and affordable accommodation open to black women.^[11]: 72 In her second year, she heard Ljuba Welitsch sing Salome from the standing-room section at the Met and became fascinated by opera. In fall 1950, Price joined Juilliard's Opera Workshop and sang small roles in workshop performances of Mozart's Magic Flute (First Lady) and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi (Aunt Nella). In the summer of 1951, she enrolled in the opera program at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood and sang Ariadne in Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos (second cast).^[12]

Early career

In early 1952, Price performed as Mistress Ford in a Juilliard production of Verdi's Falstaff.^[9] Virgil Thomson heard a performance and cast her in a revival of his all-black opera, Four Saints in Three Acts.^[3] After two weeks on Broadway, the production of Saints went to Paris. Meanwhile, Price had been signed to sing Bess in a new production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess at the Ziegfeld Theatre,^[13] directed by Robert Breen.^[14]

Price in Porgy and Bess in 1953

Fresh off the plane from Paris, she sang the opening performance of Porgy and Bess at the State Fair of Texas on June 9, 1952, receiving rave reviews. The production played in Pittsburgh, Chicago and Washington, D.C., and then toured Vienna, Berlin, London, and Paris, under the auspices of the U.S. State Department.

On the eve of the European tour, Price married William Warfield, her Porgy and a noted bass-baritone concert singer. The ceremony took place at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, with many in the cast in attendance.

Although many black newspapers criticized the export of Porgy and Bess as presenting a false and demeaning picture of black life, the Breen production showed off a new generation of highly trained black singers, and affirmed that Americans could revive a musical masterpiece while recognizing its outdated stereotypes. Many East Berliners crossed to West Berlin to see the show, to the degree that the State Department ordered that East German currency be accepted at face value instead of the present exchange rate.^[15]

When Porgy and Bess returned to the States in 1953, Warfield was unable to adjust a busy recital and concert schedule and was dropped from the cast, while Price sang Bess for another year, on Broadway and a second US tour. Warfield said the episode put a strain on their young marriage. The couple was legally separated in 1967, and divorced in 1973. They had no children.^[16]

Price and Warfield both dreamt of careers in opera, but racism limited opportunities for black singers. The New York City Center Opera under Laszlo Halasz had hired the first black singers in leading roles in the mid-1940s, starting with Camilla Williams and Todd Duncan. In 1949, the new general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Rudolf Bing, had said publicly he would cast Negro singers "for the right part".

The Metropolitan Opera recognized Price's potential by inviting her to sing "Summertime" at a "Met Jamboree" fund-raiser on April 6, 1953, at the Ritz Theater on Broadway. Price was thus the first African American to sing with and for the Met, if not at the Met as a member of the company. That distinction went to Marian Anderson, who sang Ulrica in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera on January 7, 1955. Price and Warfield were in the audience.

While awaiting a chance to sing in opera, Price sang duo concerts with Warfield, and, after leaving Porgy and Bess, began a concert career for Columbia Artists. In 1953, she sang a recital at the Library of Congress, with composer Samuel Barber at the piano. The program included the world premiere of Barber's Hermit Songs. In November 1954, Price made her formal recital debut at New York's Town Hall.

Emergence

The door to opera opened through the young medium of television and the NBC Opera Theatre, with music director Peter Herman Adler. In January 1955,^[9] Price 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 NBC Opera chorus for several seasons.) Price went on to star in three other NBC Opera broadcasts, as Pamina in Mozart's The Magic Flute in 1956, as Madame Lidoine in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites the following years, and as Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni in 1960. Tosca was not controversial. Price's appearance had not been widely advertised by NBC, which had a policy of "integration without identification", and the Jackson, Mississippi, NBC affiliate carried the broadcast signal to her home town of Laurel. However, Jet magazine noted that her appearance with tenor David Poleri, the Cavaradossi, marked a first TV broadcast with a mixed-racial couple, and her later NBC Opera broadcasts were boycotted by several NBC affiliates, most of them in the South, because of her race.

In March 1955, Price 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 to direct her future European operatic career.

After a successful Town Hall recital debut in November 1954, Price began touring the U.S. and Canada in recitals on the Columbia Artists roster, at first with the composer John La Montaine as her accompanist and then with David Garvey, who remained her pianistic partner until his death. In 1956, she and Garvey toured India and then, the next year, Australia, giving concerts and recitals for the U.S. State Department. On May 3, 1957, she performed Verdi's Aida in a concert performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the May Festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan, her first public performance of what became her signature role.

External audio
Hear Leontyne Price in Mozart's Requiem with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, and Hilde Rössel-Majdan, Fritz Wunderlich, Eberhard Waechter and Walter Berry in 1960

Her first performance at a major opera house was at the San Francisco Opera on September 20, 1957, as Madame Lidoine in the U.S. premiere of Dialogues of the Carmelites.^[13] A few weeks later, she appeared as Aida on stage, substituting at the last minute for Antonietta Stella, who had suffered an appendicitis. Price's European opera debut came in May 1958, again as Aida, at the Vienna State Opera with Karajan conducting. This was followed by performances of the role at the Royal Opera House in London (replacing Anita Cerquetti), and at the Arena di Verona.^[13]

The next fall, she appeared as Leonora in Verdi's Il trovatore in San Francisco, with the Swedish tenor Jussi Björling. Then, returning to Vienna, she sang Aida and her first onstage Pamina. She gave a BBC television recital of American songs with Gerald Moore, and a concert of operatic scenes by Richard Strauss for BBC Radio, conducted by Adler. In Vienna, she made her first full opera recording for RCA, singing Donna Elvira in Mozart's Don Giovanni, conductd by Erich Leinsdorf.

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

That fall, Price made her Chicago Lyric Opera debut as Liu in Puccini's Turandot with Birgit Nilsson in the title role, and sang Massenet's Thaïs.^[13] Her Liu was well received while her Thaïs was considered stiff and mannered. On May 21, 1960, she sang for the first time at La Scala in Milan, again as Aida.^[13] 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, again with Karajan.^[13] She then returned to Vienna to appear first as Cio-Cio-San in Puccini's Madama Butterfly.

Metropolitan Opera

Bing had made overtures to Price before, and in 1958 had invited her to sing two Aidas. She turned him down on the advice of Adler and others, who argued that she should wait until she had more repertoire under her belt and could arrive as a true prima donna. Adler also warned against arriving in the racially stereotypical role of Aida, an Ethiopian slave. In his autobiography, 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, her first Met contract booked her for five roles in 1961, Leonora in Il trovatore, Aida, Donna Anna, Liu, and Butterfly.

On January 27, 1961, Price and Franco Corelli made a triumphant joint debut in Il trovatore.^[13] The performance ended with an ovation that was certainly one of the longest in Met history.^[9] A Met official said it lasted at least 35 minutes. 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."^[17]

Reviewers were less enthusiastic about Corelli, who was infuriated and told Bing the next day he would never sing with Price again. The outburst was soon forgotten, and Price and Corelli sang together often, at the Met, in Vienna, in Salzburg, and once, for Karajan's version of Bizet'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".^[18]

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, none of them lasted as long or achieved such eminence. Price was a box office hit (her performances in her first two seasons were almost all sold out), and the first to be asked to sing a season opening night, a true sign of prima donna status.

The opening in September 1961, in Puccini’s ‘’La fanciulla del West’’, almost didn't happen. That summer, a musicians' strike threatened and Bing, frustrated with the negotiations, canceled the season. Under pressure from the government, Bing and the musicians agreed to allow Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to mediate a settlement.

For her first night, Price received enthusiastic reviews but during the second she confronted her first vocal crisis. In the middle of the second act, she slowly lost her voice and by the end of the scene she was shouting the words. The standby, soprano Dorothy Kirsten, was called and finished the performance. The newspapers said that Price was suffering a viral infection, but stress and the unsuitable weight of the role of Minnie played their parts.^[19]

After several weeks off, Price repeated Puccini's La fanciulla del West and then, after a Butterfly in December, which ended with the singer in tears, cleared her schedule and 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, having performed a schedule of history making intensity, without a vacation for several years. In April, now rested and in fine voice, she returned to the Met for her first Toscas and then joined the company’s spring tour for the first time in Tosca, Butterfly, and Fanciulla. Recognizing that Price would have to be included on the tour, which would create problems for presenters in the segregated South, Bing declared that the Met would no longer perform to segregated houses, starting in 1962. Price gave the first performance by an African American to sing a leading role with the company in the South, singing Fanciulla in Dallas. Two years later, she sang Donna Anna in Atlanta, a first in the Deep South. Both performances occurred without incident.

Price was soon earning the Met’s 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 older and unique in singing both Italian and Wagnerian roles, earned a little more, at $3,000 a performance.

Price remained active in Vienna, Milan, and Salzburg. She performed a famous Il trovatore in Salzburg un 1962, and Tosca, Donna Anna and Aida, in Vienna, most often with Karajan. She was also the soprano soloist in many of Karajan's performances of Verdi's Requiem.^[20]

After the first Met season, Price added seven roles to her repertoire over the next five years: Elvira in Verdi's Ernani, Pamina, 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.

Late opera career

In the late 1960s, Price cut back her operatic performances and devoted more of her schedule to recitals and concerts. She said she was tired, stressed by racial tensions in the U.S., and frustrated with the number and quality of the new productions she’d been given 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 major American cities and universities.

She realized she needed to maintain some visibility in opera as well, and she 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.

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

At the same time, she was cautious – some said too cautious – in choosing new roles, conscious of her need to keep her reputation as a leading prima donna intact. After 1970, she performed only three new roles: Giorgetta in Puccini's Il tabarro in San Francisco; Puccini's Manon Lescaut, in San Francisco and New York; and the title role in Ariadne auf Naxos, also in San Francisco and New York. Of these, only Ariadne was considered by critics as superlative.

She appeared even more rarely in opera in Europe. In the early 1970s, she sang Aida and a single Forza in Hamburg, and returned to London's Covent Garden in Trovatore and Aida. However, she gave well received 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 1976, after almost a decade, she renewed her partnership with Karajan in a performance of Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem with the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. This was followed by a nostalgic revival of their famous 1962 ‘’Il trovatore’’ production in Vienna and Salzburg, followed by a recording for EMI, all led by Karajan.

That fall, Price sang her 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 canceled all but the first and last of eight scheduled performances. Reviewing the first performance, the New York Times critic John Rockwell was not complimentary.^[21]

Price in 1981

In the U.S., her beautiful voice, personal dignity, and well known patriotism made her an iconic American, who was called to sing on important national or ceremonial 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.) In 1980, 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 had invited her to sing a recital from the East Room of the White House that was nationally televised and won an Emmy.

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 D. Roosevelt.

On July 4, 1983, she sang with the National Philharmonic on the Capitol Mall, and in fall 1986, Price sang the national anthem backed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Orange County Performing Arts Center's opening.

Price also sang for Presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton.

Her voice proved resilient as she entered her 50s. 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. Herbert Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Price 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 Ronald and Nancy 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’s Janes Levine persuaded her to return for several Forzas in 1984 and a series of ‘’Aida’’s in 1984–1985. Performances of both operas were broadcast in the "Live from the Met" TV series on PBS. These were her first and only appearances in the series and important documents of two of her greatest roles.^[18]

Shortly before her final Aida, on January 3, 1985, word leaked 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 local edition 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 3 aria, "O patria mia", as the no. 1 "Great Moment" in 30 years of "Live from the Met" telecasts.^[22][23] One critic described Price's voice as "vibrant", "soaring" and "a Price beyond pearls".^[23] Time magazine called her voice "Rich, supple and shining, it was in its prime capable of effortless soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C."^[24]

In 21 seasons with the Met, Price gave 201 performances, in 16 roles, in the house and on tour. After her 1961 debut season, 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.

Post-operatic career

Price in 1995

For the next dozen years, Price 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 Joseph Marx, an operatic aria or two, followed by French mélodies, 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.^[25]

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.^[26]

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."^[27]

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 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 high B-flat.^[28]

In 2017, the age of 90, Price appeared in Susan Froemke's The Opera House, a documentary about the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center in 1966.^[29]

Cited sources

Books

• Kutsch, K.-J.; Riemens, Leo (2012). "Warfield, William". Großes Sängerlexikon (in German) (4th ed.). De Gruyter. p. 4269. ISBN 978-3-59-844088-5.
• Story, Rosalyn M. (1990). And So I Sing: African American Divas of Opera and Concert. Amistad. ISBN 978-0-446-71016-9.
• Chotzinoff, Samuel (1964). A Little Nightmusic: Intimate Conversations with Jascha Heifetz, Vladimir Horowitz, Gian Carlo Menotti, Leontyne Price, Richard Rodgers, Artur Rubinstein, Andrés Segovia. Harper & Row.

News and encyclopedia articles

• Blyth, Alan (2009) [2001]. "Price, (Mary Violet) Leontyne". Grove Music Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.22337. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0. (subscription or UK public library membership required)
• Blyth, Alan (2002) [1992]. "Price, (Mary Violet) Leontyne (opera)". Grove Music Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.O002807. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0. (subscription or UK public library membership required)
• Driscoll, F. Paul (n.d.). "Leontyne Price". Opera News. Retrieved October 1, 2019.
• Garland, Phyl (June 1985). "Leontyne Price: Getting Out At the Top. A prima donna assoluta says goodbye to the opera, will continue as concert singer". Ebony. Retrieved February 21, 2011.
• "Leontyne Price interview: 'It's terrible but you know I just love the sound of my own voice'". Gramophone. February 6, 2017.
• "Price, Leontyne". Oxford African American Studies Center. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. doi:10.1093/acref/9780195301731.013.43007. ISBN 978-0-19-530173-1.
• "Leontyne Price, Ill, To Rest for Month". The New York Times. December 23, 1961.
• "Classical Hero Leontyne Price". WQXR-FM. July 31, 2018.