Leontyne Price

American opera singer

• Born: February 10, 1927
• Place of Birth: Laurel, Mississippi

Internationally acclaimed soprano of the operatic and concert stage, Leontyne Price paved the way for many Black classical performers. The fifth Black singer to appear at the Metropolitan Opera, she was the first to sustain a long career there. During her thirty-four-year history at the Met, she became the most sought-after prima donna at the opera house.

Early Life

Leontyne Price was born Mary Violet Leontine Price to James Anthony Price, a mill worker, and Katherine Baker Price, a midwife, in the city of Laurel, a county seat in southeastern Mississippi. (In college, she changed the spelling of her name to Leontyne.) The Prices’ family life was centered around the church, where Price and her brother, George, spent much of their time. Music was always an integral part of home and church life. Price’s father played tuba in the church band, and her mother sang in St. Paul’s choir. Price exhibited unusual musical instincts at an early age, and her mother immediately sought musical training for her. At three-and-a-half years old, Price began piano lessons with the local music teacher, Hattie V. J. McInnis. In school, she sang in choral groups and as school soloist while also excelling in dance and acrobatics. By age eleven, she played regularly for Sunday school and church services.

The first major event that affected Price’s future musical career was a trip to Jackson, Mississippi, to hear a concert by the Black contralto Marian Anderson. Impressed by the beauty and power of communication of Anderson’s voice, nine-year-old Price at once aspired to a stage career. Her first solo concert was performed on December 17, 1943, in Sandy Gavin School Auditorium, where she played classical piano selections and sang for an audience that demanded several curtain calls.

Price attended Oak Park Vocational High School in Laurel and maintained an A average while continuing to perform both as a singer and as pianist for the school choir. After graduation in 1944 (with honors), Price won a four-year scholarship to Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio. She graduated from Wilberforce in 1948 certified to teach public school music. Recognizing her remarkable gift, however, her teachers had encouraged Price to pursue a performance career. With the advice of her voice teacher, Catherine Van Buren, and the college’s president, Charles Wesley, she obtained a full scholarship to attend the Juilliard School of Music in New York. Additional money for living expenses was contributed by Elizabeth Chisholm, a musician and wealthy White resident of Laurel for whom Price’s aunt worked. Chisholm had recognized the girl’s talent and often paid Price to entertain for occasions in her home. Even when financial support was no longer needed, she remained a lifelong friend and patron. Another important contributor to Price’s scholarship fund was celebrated baritone Paul Robeson, who, after hearing Price sing, agreed to perform a benefit concert in Dayton Memorial Hall. She also appeared on this concert program, from which one thousand dollars were raised for her education.

Life’s Work

Price entered Juilliard in 1948, where she studied stage presence, acting, and makeup in addition to singing. She was placed in the voice studio of Florence Page Kimball. Kimball remained a friend, adviser, and voice coach long after her student left Juilliard. It is Kimball whom Price credited for her basic knowledge of vocal technique. Several milestones in Price’s career came as a result of her Juilliard work. In 1952, Price was cast in her first major operatic role as Mistress Ford in the Juilliard production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff. At these performances, the soprano was heard by numerous important musicians. Virgil Thomson, a noted composer and music critic, was assembling a cast for an International Music Festival production of his all-Black opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Price was chosen to sing St. Cecilia at the opera’s New York opening and later in Paris, marking the beginning of her international appearances. Robert Breen and Blevins Davis were also present at her Juilliard performance in Falstaff and immediately offered her a contract as Bess in the 1952 revival of George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. Porgy and Bess made an international tour sponsored by the US State Department and, in 1953, was produced on Broadway. Price remained with the cast for two years and received wide acclaim for her portrayal of Bess. During the rehearsals for Porgy and Bess, Price met baritone William Warfield, who portrayed Porgy. On August 31, 1952, the couple was married. However, professional demands on the two performers overwhelmed the relationship, and they separated in 1959, although their legal separation did not occur until 1967. They divorced in 1973. They remained friends, however, as well as mutually supportive colleagues.

American composer Nicolas Nabokov, who was also impressed with Price’s Falstaff performance, introduced her to one of the most influential figures of her professional life, composer and pianist Samuel Barber. Barber heard Price in a performance of Porgy and Bess in 1953 when composing his cycle of Hermit Songs, and he completed them with Price’s voice in mind. He accompanied her when she sang them for the first time at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and later the same year at the Twentieth Century Music Conference in Rome. He then arranged for her to sing his Prayers of Kierkegaard in her debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1954, Barber was also pianist for Hermit Songs during Price’s Town Hall debut recital in New York. This long and valuable association continued throughout their careers.

The year 1955 marked the most radical turning point in Price’s career. On hearing her in Porgy and Bess, Peter Herman Adler cast Price in the role of Floria Tosca in the NBC Opera Company production of Tosca, breaking the color barrier in the operatic world, especially in the United States. Although not carried by twelve NBC affiliate stations in the South, the production was still a major success, and the young Black soprano was no longer an unknown to the operatic world.

Following Tosca, Price’s career opportunities multiplied rapidly. She signed a management contract with André Mertens of Columbia Artist Management, who introduced her to conductor Herbert von Karajan. Karajan, then conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, introduced Price to European opera audiences. After she refused his offer to sing the demanding title role in Salomé by Richard Strauss, he presented her instead in a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aïda with the Vienna State Opera in 1959, in which she was an enormous success as the Ethiopian princess. Just before singing Aïda, Price made her American operatic stage debut on September 20, 1957, with the San Francisco Opera as Madame Liodine in Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. She continued to appear in San Francisco throughout her career, and performances included roles in Aïda and Il Trovatore by Verdi and in Carl Orff’s The Wise Maiden and as Donna Anna in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni. She also appeared in the title role in Jules Massenet’s Thaïs and as Liù in Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1959.

Price was becoming known the world over for her ravishing, warm lyric soprano voice that proved to be the perfect instrument for the works of Verdi and Puccini. She became the most celebrated Verdi singer of her era. The role of Aïda, especially, became synonymous with Price, not only for the ethnic heritage that helped make her ideal for the role but also because of the sumptuous quality of her voice, which was able to soar with the drama. When approached by the Metropolitan Opera in 1961, after several previous attempts to schedule a debut performance for her had failed, she chose to portray Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore so as to avoid making her debut in what the public might interpret as a role for “Black sopranos.” Her debut, with its forty-five-minute ovation, made sensational headlines. Price sang five major roles with the Metropolitan Opera in her first season: Leonora (Il Trovatore), Aïda (Aïda), Donna Anna (Don Giovanni), Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and Liù in Turandot. Although Price’s voice was recognized as lighter in quality than voices of singers often heard in those roles, it had a special quality that projected a highly charged emotional element and adequate power to fill the opera house. In 1962, she had the honor of singing the opening night of a new production of Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West. She continued to sing with the Met and in Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, Cologne, Berlin, and the Soviet Union. In 1964, Price was doubly honored for her work: she received a Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (Price in turn sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” at Johnson’s state funeral in January 1973.)

The highest honor in Price’s career came in 1966 when she was chosen to star in Samuel Barber’s opera Antony and Cleopatra , which had been commissioned for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. Barber wrote the role of Cleopatra especially for Price, and the music was ideally suited to her voice. Reviews of the performance were mixed as a result of production problems attributed to designer Franco Zeffirelli; nevertheless, references to Price’s singing of Cleopatra were glowing. Her repertoire began to include new roles, such as Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte and Manon in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. She added the last new role to her repertoire in 1977 when she performed the title role in Strauss’s Ariadne, which received accolades.

In 1985, Price retired from the operatic stage to devote more time to concerts, recitals, and master classes while her talent was still at its peak. Appropriately, she chose Aïda for her farewell role. Her personal identification with the role, which focused on freedom and loyalty to family and country, created for her a special attachment to Aïda. On January 4, 1985, she had the distinction of singing her last performance as a live telecast by the Public Broadcasting Service from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

During the ensuing twelve years, Price gave concerts and recitals with her accompanist David Garvey. The programs were varied. They often featured arias and art songs, including some written especially for her, such as Barber’s rewritten arias from Antony and Cleopatra. She also sang German lieder, French mélodies, and spirituals. Many of these concerts took place in American cities and universities, but she also regularly appeared at the Salzburg Festival and in European cities. Her final regular recital was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on November 19, 1987. However, she did not retire completely. She sang at Carnegie Hall’s one-hundredth anniversary in 1991, and in an October 2001 memorial concert for the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center that had occurred a month earlier, she sang “This Little Light of Mine” to the piano accompaniment of James Levine and a solo of “God Bless America.”

In addition to opera, oratorio, and recital performances, Price maintained an active recording schedule throughout her career. All of her major roles have been recorded, nineteen of these recordings earned Grammy Awards, and she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989. In 1996, RCA-BMG issued The Essential Leontyne Price, an eleven-CD box set of her recordings, with a book included, to honor her seventieth birthday. Among those with whom she sings in it are Robert Merrill, Sherrill Milnes, William Warfield, Ezio Flagello, and Robert Amis el Hage. A second volume, The Essential Leontyne Price: Spirituals, Hymns, and Sacred Songs came out the following year. Her long association with Verdi’s opera inspired her to write a children’s book version of it in 1990, Aida, As Told by Leontyne Price.

Price continued to give master classes at Juilliard and other schools until 2004. In 2005, television talk show host and media maven Oprah Winfrey included Price and twenty-four other African American women at her Legends Ball, and in 2007, a poll by the British Broadcasting Corporation placed Price among the twenty all-time best sopranos. The following year, she was one of the first to receive the Opera Honors from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2017, Price appeared in a documentary, titled The Opera House, about the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center in 1966.

Significance

Price was recognized first for her extraordinary artistry and additionally for the exposure she afforded other African American singers as a result of opening many doors that had previously been closed to them throughout the world. Price was acutely aware of her Black heritage and made careful decisions about career issues that she believed would ultimately make life better for minorities. She had friends among the major civil rights leaders of the United States, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and supported and worked through organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP. In 1969, Rust College in Mississippi (where her mother had attended school) named a new library in honor of Price. Among her many other honors are the Kennedy Center Honors (1980), National Medal of Arts (1985), Handel Medallion (1985), French Order of Arts and Letters (1986), Essence Award (1990), Mississippi’s Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1999), Library of Congress’ Living Legends Award (2000), induction into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame (2000), the National Association of Black Broadcasters Award (2002), and the National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honors award (2008). She also received more than a dozen Grammy Awards for best classical vocal soloist performance.

Price was the most celebrated American diva of her time, and many critics considered her the best interpreter of Verdi’s operas in the twentieth century because of the expressiveness and accuracy of her lirico-spinto soprano voice. Her presence was demanded on stages internationally. She treated her artistic gift with great respect, using it to communicate messages of love, beauty, and freedom to people all over the world. Moreover, she displayed a greatness of spirit, an ability to reevaluate herself even though she was a leading diva. When in middle age her voice grew darker and heavier, she sometimes indulged in vocal embellishments; when von Karajan upbraided her for it, she took his advice seriously and sang truer to her classic style. As an American, as a Black woman, and as a consummate artist, she charted new courses and earned the admiration of all who knew her work.

Bibliography

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Davis, Peter G. The American Opera Singer: The Lives and Adventures of America’s Great Singers in Opera and Concert from 1825 to the Present. Anchor, 1999.

Hughes, Langston, and Milton Meltzer. Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment. Prentice-Hall, 1967.

Jackson, Jacquelyn. “Leontyne Price.” Epic Lives: One Hundred Black Women Who Made a Difference. Ed. Jessie Carney Smith. Visible Ink, 1993.

Jacobson, Robert. “Collard Greens to Caviar.” Opera News July-Aug. 1985: 18+.

Lyon, Hugh L. Leontyne Price: Highlights of a Prima Donna. Vantage, 1973.

McCoy, Patrick D. "Leontyne Price, Soprano: Prima Donna Assoluta." In Spite of the Double Drawbacks: African American Women in History and Culture. By Lopez D. Matthews Jr., Kenvi Phillips, Ida Jones, and Marshanda Smith. Association of Black Women Historians, 2012.

McNair, Joseph D. Leontyne Price. Child’s World, 2000.

Price, Leontyne. “Leontyne Price: Getting Out at the Top.” Interview by Phyl Garland. Ebony, June 1985, p. 31.

Sargeant, Winthrop. Divas. Coward, 1973.

Story, Rosalyn M. And So I Sing: African-American Divas of Opera and Concert. Warner, 1990.

Story, Rosalyn M. "If I Could Sing Like a Daughter of God." Opera News, June 2010, pp. 28–31.

Tommasini, Anthony. "Leontyne Price, Legendary Diva, Is a Movie Star at 90." The New York Times, 22 Dec. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/arts/music/leontyne-price-met-opera.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Zamora, Camille. “A Legend Leads the Way.” American Record Guide, Mar.-Apr. 2004, p. 22.