Leontyne Price Library

In March. 1967, Ms. Leontyne Price sang a benefit concert for Rust College at the Mississippi Coliseum in Jackson, which netted the college $34,000. From this beginning, Rust College became another campus with a new library that occupies a central point on the campus. The award-winning building was dedicated on December 14, 1969, in honor of this famous Metropolitan Opera singer, the Leontyne Price Library. Click on title for link to LPL.

Leontyne Price and 9/11.

Leontyne Price, looking every inch the American Monument that she is, sang "This Little Light o' Mine", changing the words to "Ours". She ended it with a perfectly sustained and diminished high note (a C? I'm not infallible at these things) and of course there was pandemonium. Despite the mad diva-worship going on, she maintained her look of deepest gravity and intent, and sang "America the Beautiful", pride and determination personified, and capped the final "shining sea" with a shining C (I think) or her own. In spite of the thunderous, worshipful applause, she did not sing anything else, and her look made it very clear that this was not about her but something bigger. A wonderful evening. This is just SO LIKE HER. At Bob Jacobson's funeral, during one of the first peaks of the AIDS crisis several Met singers introduced themselves and sang this aria or that. She did not introduce herself, just walked up, sang the piss out of "Vissi d'arte", and sat down. She was paying tribute to a good friend, and stating her mind, and no other considerations were of interest to her. She has also been a good neighbor (she lives a mile north of the towers; I overlook her backyard), and chaired the effort to rebuild St. Luke's after its fire, and famously (among the old Italian inhabitants of this neighborhood), came to St. Anthony of Padua church and sang at the funeral of the old man whose liquor store she had long frequented.

Time after Time. Article Opera News October 1996. Steven Blier

Time After Time Throughout her long career, Leontyne Price has inspired fans and a new generation of singers by Steven Blier I 've just spent a month in bed with RCA's The Essential Leontyne Price, and it's been a revelation. Since I grew up to the sound of her voice, first heard her early in my operagoing experience and spent my allowance on her records, I thought I knew pretty much all I needed to know about this woman's singing. I was wrong. The occasion of this particular close encounter is the release of RCA's eleven-disc CD retrospective of Price's recordings, spanning a good twenty-five years of her career. Price sang her first opera role at Juilliard in 1951, and just this past May she sang a recital in Newark that was, by all reports, stunningly beautiful. As a voice coach and accompanist, I am moved by that fact alone to lock the door, plump up the pillows, wrestle with the CD player and upgrade my headphones to get at her secret of survival. Price is going strong at sixty-nine -- after years of full-out singing in a demanding repertory. "You must be a lion to sing Verdi," said Callas. But lions don't usually sing for almost fifty years; lions burn out. Price didn't burn out; she even managed to weather a high-profile crisis at the beginning of her career, when her voice gave out during a run of La Fanciulla del West, necessitating her withdrawal from the Met, indeed from the opera stage, for a period. Opera in the early 1960s resembled a battlefield, strewn with the vocally wounded. A significant cross-section of the era's giants were getting into acute vocal trouble -- Callas, Tebaldi, Schwarzkopf, Del Monaco, Di Stefano, Valletti, Bastianini, Rysanek, De Los Angeles -- while other artists, such as Moffo and Farrell, seemed unlikely to fulfill their initial operatic promise for other reasons. Price not only survived but went on to decades of triumph. To the outside observer, she appeared to emerge from her difficulties without a scratch. I first heard her when I was a kid, in a 1965 Ernani not long after her return to the Met. I thought she sang with tremendous beauty and total abandon, though not always with both at the same time. Price wasn't careful or parsimonious with her voice. She flung it into the hall with amazing generosity and creativity, seemingly fearless even after what must have been quite a scare. (What I most vividly recall about that performance, actually, was the Act I, Scene 2, entrance of Arturo Sergi, replacing an indisposed Franco Corelli. Making his stealthy entrance down a flight of stairs to wrest Leontyne from the unwanted advances of Cornell MacNeil, Sergi tripped and fell, dagger in hand, knocking the staircase into the back wall of the set, which seesawed back and forth for what seemed an eternity. Price and MacNeil froze in mid-scuffle until the crisis was over, Sergi back on his feet, the wall at rest. Now that's something you just don't see anymore at the Met.) I had a chance to speak to Price recently. Her personality is a disarming display of oppositions: she's formidable but charming, guarded but open, formal and down-home, commanding and vulnerable. Her speech is like an archaeological dig through her life experience: a Southern accent erratically sprinkled with British and French touches, punctuated with Italian phrases. She instantly exploded Myth No. 1 about herself -- that she is aloof and forbidding. Price was engaging, loquacious, generous with her time. Even so, it was difficult to get her to explain her vocal longevity. She reiterated firmly a philosophy of vocal self-knowledge and stressed the idea of nurturing the voice with love and the joy of singing. As always, she credits Florence Page Kimball, who was her voice teacher starting from her Juilliard years. But like many singers, she is more metaphorical than specific about the elements of her technique. It's arrogant to try to explain how somebody else does something as invisible and personal as singing, but after my recent Leontyne orgy I've come away with a few basic theories of my own. For one thing, Price is clearly one of the great breathers. Not only does she take long phrases in one breath, but she also begins and ends phrases with vocal poise, including the very emotional ones. Even her catch breaths are calm. Price speaks often about singing on her vocal interest, not on her vocal capital. She puts it this way: "The salvation of you and your sound is that you must always think lyric, and you never go outside of what the real column of your sound is." When asked to explain this idea, Price agrees that she enhanced her sound with head resonance and high overtones, rather than by thickening its mass or pushing on its core. You rarely hear her biting into the gut of her voice -- at least not in the upper register, which she has produced with consistent beauty over the course of the decades. In the middle years of her career, Price was able to amplify the volume and darken the color of the top half of her voice, but you get the feeling that her basic vocal position for singing the top notes has remained the same for decades, and that she got it right at the start. Even at full cry, she seems to be floating the voice. Her less successful high notes err on the hooty side, which is probably safer than the opposite flaw. The only time you hear some pressure in the climaxes is right at the end of a high note, which she sometimes releases with a little bit of a zinger. By now everyone must know that familiar Leontyne cutoff: spin spin spinspinspinspinspin ZIP! If there is anything controversial about Price's voice, it's certainly her approach to her lower range, which didn't come easily for her and provided the diva with a career's worth of "constant work. Constant work. Now some people have enjoyment of that part of my voice, and some people don't. It may not be the most technically focused part of my voice. But it's better than it used to be. It used to glare, but through years of working, it tended to get better. It'll never be perfect, but I've cleaned it up a lot." The RCA set provides the CD premiere of Price's first aria recital, recorded in 1959 and known as "the blue album" because of its distinctive cover art. The performances are as beautiful as I remembered them to be, especially the Rondine aria, whose high phrases make you see God. But the texture of her voice is much lighter than I had recalled, and she sometimes gets swamped by the orchestra in the low phrases -- toward the end of "Un bel dì," before the final coda, conductor Fabritiis' tidal wave of sound completely drowns the singer out. (In the complete recording with Leinsdorf, both conductor and engineers are more considerate, and Price has a more substantial contribution to make at that point in her development.) Price never stopped looking for ways to change -- or exploit -- the huskiness and lack of clean focus in her lower-middle register. As you listen to her voice at so many different stages and in such a wide repertory, you hear her array of solutions -- from the dark, full-out chest-voice belt, in a heated Verdi confrontation, to a slightly nasal pop-singer-ish "mix" of registers in her Porgy and Bess scenes, to a bit of outright yelling in the final duet from Carmen, to a slender, sweet, girlish sound for Mozart, to the more classically correct dark, solid operatic timbre she was able to find as she matured. But when I hear those early recordings, I must confess I'm astounded that she started her career in heavy, demanding roles like Tosca and Aida -- and that she survived. The world of voice training has grown far more conservative since the 1950s, possibly as a response to the aforementioned Götterdämmerung of singers in the 1960s. I'm prepared to wager that if the neophyte Leontyne Price showed up at Juilliard today, she would be trained as a lyric coloratura and put on a steady diet of Handel and Bellini. Aida and Butterfly would be strictly off limits. Her great breakthrough would be as Violetta or the Countess. But Price turned what might have been a fatal flaw into one of her most striking qualities. Because she didn't have what the Italians call a "central sound," one that speaks cleanly in the notes at the bottom of the staff, she had to invent one. In fact, she invented several, while managing to keep the amazing coordination of the rest of her voice pretty well intact for a long time. "I am a vocal impressionist," says Price. "My voice has thousands of colors. And I tap one at will to express what I'm doing. It's instinctive." The artistic result is that she has sung with an unprecedented variety of color, varying the timbre and weight of her voice in such a way that she holds you fascinated as you traverse her recorded legacy. You may not like all her choices, and you may disapprove of some of the wilder, more unorthodox ones. (I certainly used to, in my earlier, more Calvinist days.) But the truth is that unlike many other famous singers, Price can't be predicted as to what she will do in any given piece. You can't really even predict what she will sound like. Part of this has to do with the era in which she rose to fame. Today we strive for "authenticity," but the zeitgeist of the 1960s and '70s encouraged a great deal more personal expression and individuality -- after all, before "Do your own thing" became a cliché, it had been a real watchword. And it's possible that because Price was the first black opera superstar, she was given particular license to do her own thing. The exotic beauty of her sound and the sweeping (sometimes swooping) lift of her phrasing created something new in opera. We think of Price as a classic Verdi stylist, because of the standard she set in Aida and Forza; but a famous Italian coach once confided that he initially had a hard time adjusting to all the American gospel influences she brought to Verdi's music. (The Italian public liked it just fine.) To enjoy Price the best, you just have to check at the door all your expectations of how any piece is supposed to go. Her combination of extreme vocal sensuality and musical freedom can wilt your critical faculties. It may not be echt, but it's certainly never boring. Another generational factor in Price's artistry is that her mentors included her voice teacher, conductors ranging from Karajan to the two Adlers (Kurt Herbert and Peter Herman), her pianist David Garvey (a longtime collaborator and a wonderful musician) -- but not stage directors, as is the case with many of today's singers. Price came up during a time when opera was allowed to be a far more presentational art form -- look front, express, deliver. When Price sang a love duet, she seemed to be saying, "Let me tell you 4,000 people sitting beyond this huge orchestra how much I love this tenor standing on my right." In every image I have of Price onstage, she is always facing out, emoting. And as years went by, her performances became increasingly formal, like ceremonial presentations of her voice. Price was aware that acting was not her forte -- or maybe even her interest. As a result, certain of her early roles that might have suited her vocally -- Tatyana, Fiordiligi, Thaïs -- weren't things she could mold to her stage persona. Intimate Chekhovian expression, delicate comedy of manners and exhibitionistic sensuality weren't really her thing on the opera stage, so much as grandeur and noble suffering. Price's Met career started with an explosion of acclaim when she and Corelli made their debuts the same evening in a 1961 Trovatore -- still on record as one of the longest ovations in the house's history. She went on to sing four more roles that season alone -- Aida, Donna Anna, Liù and Butterfly -- proving her artistic readiness and her commitment to the company. The Fanciulla debacle happened in October of the next season, but she bounced back to sing her first Tosca the following April. She capped this part of her career with her personal triumph in Antony and Cleopatra when the new Met opened at Lincoln Center in the fall of 1966. But after this second milestone, Price added only three new roles to her Met repertory until her retirement in 1985 -- Leonora in La Forza del Destino in 1967, which became one of her signature roles, and Manon Lescaut (1975) and Ariadne auf Naxos (1979), neither of which did. It wasn't as if Price were singing a lot of new roles at other opera houses, either; she gave San Francisco, her other major American alliance, a few performances of Il Tabarro and revisited an early triumph, Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, there as well. But New York heard Price in all her other operas -- when she was singing opera at all. The truth was that by the early 1970s, this great American opera star was making fewer and fewer opera appearances, becoming as famous for her privacy as for her public outings. In her five seasons at the Thirty-ninth Street house, Price sang eighty-two times; at the Lincoln Center house, between her 1966 Cleopatra and her 1985 farewell she sang only ninety-two times. Her relative absence from the opera stage probably had many causes, personal and professional. Price had become not just a famous singer but a national heroine, a freedom fighter. She had weathered the first part of her career and shouldered its tremendous responsibilities. She'd sung Mozart in Salzburg. She'd sung at Kennedy's inauguration. What young readers may not remember is that she'd also been on tour with the Met in the segregated South, where the company had to boycott post-performance parties where Price was not welcome. She was a symbol of American triumph. Price had worked tirelessly for a decade, earning the honors and coping with the attendant traumas. My sense is that she was finding that her voice needed more protection and recovery time than it used to require. She was in her early forties, a transitional time for most singers, especially sopranos. She may simply have needed to lead a calmer life, after the deaths of her mother, her voice teacher and her longtime housekeeper. I also suspect she was unsure which way to go vocally. In interviews from that period, she mentions her interest in Strauss, but Der Rosenkavalier and Die Frau ohne Schatten never materialized on her schedule. Some say she should have restudied her vocal method, balancing and completing the voice, adding bite and solidity in the lower half and some thrust into the top. But that is a very dangerous thing for someone at the top of her profession to do in mid-career. "I like success," she says, and big public risks court failure. Instead, she continued to do what she had been doing -- and then some, exaggerating the idiosyncrasies of her style, tearing off uninhibitedly into wild, bizarre colors (there's more than a touch of Aretha Franklin in her later renditions of "Pace, mio Dio"), interlacing sublime lyric heights with some high camp onstage. Her middle voice darkened, and her upper register lost some of its size and sheen in the fortes. But Price also wanted to give the musical public something new and arresting, so she adopted a modified Glenn Gould solution in the recording studio. Onstage, she sang her old roles. But for the microphone, the sky was the limit, especially in her series of five Prima Donna albums, which covered the vocal waterfront from Gilda to Turandot, from Marietta to Isolde, Violetta to Lady Macbeth, Alceste to La Périchole. It's an audacious achievement, full of surprises and beauties, including a "Care selve" that has become a vocal classic, a "Caro nome" whose stunning final high E belies the diva's age when she recorded it (fifty-two), a radiant monologue from Dialogues and a soaring Lombardi aria that gives a tantalizing glimpse of what Price might have been able to bring to other early Verdi roles. And while she may have been uncomfortable acting Thaïs onstage, her vocal acting in the mirror aria conjures up enough narcissistic neurosis to keep a shrink busy for a decade. Some of the arias seem a little inert -- especially in the first few phrases, where Price has an odd habit of using a dullish, straight tone before her engines fire up. Throughout the recitals there are little slips in the languages, especially French; and some of the heavier pieces come across as carefully managed rather than freely given, like the Oberon and Norma arias. With a microphone, Price could simulate the weighty middle register of a dramatic soprano voice, but at the expense of her usual spin and freedom at the top. Just when you conclude that the heavy stuff is definitely not for her, however, you come across her "In questa reggia," belted out with amazing vibrancy and authority. But that's the thing about Leontyne Price. The moment you reach a conclusion about her, she overturns it. You think of her as stentorian and grandstanding, and then you hear her Rosenkavalier monologue, astoundingly sweet, intimate and confessional, and (another preconception overturned) elegantly stylish. With anticipation you turn to Berlioz' Les Nuits d'Été to check out "Le spectre de la rose," only to find it, well, kind of belted out. The famous insinuating, descending chromatic phrase "mais ... ne ... crains ... rien" comes out sounding like a military order. But then the last three songs are magical. You decide that Price may be too much the diva to identify with Salome, but she foils you again with a perfect evocation of what she calls "a fifteen-year-old sicko" -- the final scene is one of her most fully drawn, honest character portrayals, unmannered, thrillingly vocalized, non-campy (except for a few low notes that sound like someone blowing air over the top of a Coke bottle -- a big Coke bottle). Salome whets your appetite to hear her sing Strauss' Vier Letzte Lieder, surely a perfect Price vehicle, but while there are many stunning phrases, you have a little trouble adjusting to the persistent darkness of her middle register when she has to sing full out against the big orchestra, robbing the songs of the tenderness and sweetness you were expecting. The moment you reach a conclusion about Price, she overturns it. If Price seemed to be singing more opera in the recording studios than in the theater by the 1970s, she was far from idle, filling her schedule with recital appearances. And it is possible that she made better use of her gifts in this way. For one thing, the lyricism of the song recital obviously has contributed to the ongoing freshness of her voice. She was able to go to many universities and smaller cities where her concerts had a profound effect on listeners who would have had few chances to hear her in opera. "I try to convert people with my sound and my color," Price said of her recordings. But it's equally true of her concerts; it is remarkable to me how often a recital by Leontyne Price is cited by other artists -- singers, pianists, conductors, directors -- as the crystallizing event that led them to a career in music. Price reveals a seriousness of purpose in her relationship to her audiences: "Whenever I am onstage, it is during -- I am happy to say -- my ovations, the love that I receive from the audience, it is in that moment I am trying to promise my public, 'I will be better next time.'" Many of my Juilliard students know little of other recent influential voices -- say, Beverly Sills or Renata Scotto; Leonie Rysanek's farewell performance last January at the Met after her extraordinary thirty-seven-year career didn't ring much of a bell with them, either. But Price still evokes real fervor, for her recordings, concerts and master classes. Price's concerts brought a luster to Strauss and Poulenc and Liszt, but she was a passionate advocate of American vocal music, too: songs by Lee Hoiby, Ned Rorem, Lou Harrison and Samuel Barber figured in her repertory. She never sang a recital without including a group of American songs. Price is proud to be "a chauvinistic American; and as an American, you may never be an haute-couture lied specialist -- but we are broader than that. We are a mixture of the best of everything, and as an American, it is my duty to present our music -- especially in my own country, where American song is not too well appreciated. When a young singer comes backstage and says 'I liked such-and-such a thing,' I grab them and say, 'Learn it!'" I'm here to testify that this method has worked -- young singers do sing American songs because of Price's inspiration. She describes herself as "an American troubadour," and in the second half of her career she earned the title, popularizing opera and song with an honesty and dignity that the Three Tenors might do well to embrace. RCA has included some song in their retrospective -- her very beautiful Schumann recording, the early German and French recital, as well as the first release of a live Brahms Zigeunerlieder. But I wish that RCA had included a live disc of Price in American art song, rather than the dullish "Songs of Faith" on disc 10; it's an oversight in her recorded legacy that ought to be corrected. The Essential Leontyne Price contains so much overwhelming beauty, sounds of such incandescence, that it is impossible to tire of them. For me, the most piercing eloquence of all comes in her performance of Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which Price recorded soon after her father's death. The uncanny color she uses, part child and part angel, brings us into startlingly close contact with the singer. "That's me as a Southerner. My Mama used to make those quilts that are mentioned in that poem. I have seen all the things in that poem. It was at the same time one of the easiest and one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my recording career." Running a close second would be the ninth disc, containing twenty-three spirituals -- especially the ones with the Rust College Choir. I might also direct your attention to the Così duet with Marilyn Horne, recorded live (and unedited) at the Met in 1982. Price's freshness, agility and awesome breath control are arresting in themselves, and staggering for a singer in her mid-fifties. The Aida duet from the same afternoon is pretty unruly, but Price's voice in the Mozart sounds like her most youthful recordings, only with a bit more finish. I needn't add that this is highly irregular. One last piece of advice: do not listen to these discs while driving or operating heavy machinery. I nearly crashed my car listening to the Ballo duet with Bergonzi, came close to rear-ending a truck while playing the Ägyptische Helena aria, and stopped dead in the middle of a busy intersection, too bewitched to move, during "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free." Do what I did: take them to bed. Look, they're going to knock you flat on your back anyway. MR. BLIER is a New York-based pianist and voice coach. He is co-director of the New York Festival of Song with Michael Barrett and is on the faculty of the Juilliard School. OPERA NEWS, October 1996 Copyright © 1996 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.

"Bouquet for Leontyne Price" Article Opera News, April 1, 1995

OPERA NEWS, April 1, 1995 Bouquet for Leontyne Reynolds Price on why Leontyne Price is the finest soprano of our time Credentials first. Applying draconian standards of judgment, I can still say that among the handful of supreme vocal artists of the past fifty years, I've had the luck to witness performances by a majority of their number. Though I grew up in small towns and have spent most of my life in the South, I saw and heard Jussi Bjoerling and Cesare Siepi in a Met Don Carlo, Kirsten Flagstad on her postwar return to the Met in Tristan und Isolde and Fidelio, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in a London Verdi Requiem and a Salzburg Le Nozze di Figaro, Birgit Nilsson in a Covent Garden Tristan, Joan Sutherland in a Covent Garden Die Meistersinger and a concert Alcina and Luciano Pavarotti in a San Francisco Turandot. In recital I heard Marian Anderson four times, Lauritz Melchior twice, Schwarzkopf three times, Ezio Pinza and Flagstad and Fischer-Dieskau once; and among their near-peers, I heard in opera Domingo, Horne, Milanov, Steber and Vickers. In fact, among the supreme singers of my adult lifetime whom I might have witnessed in their prime -- and I began in the mid-1940s -- I missed only Welitsch and Callas. My rule of thumb for a supreme vocal artist, incidentally, is one whose instrument is beautiful, unmistakably distinctive in timbre and as perfectly disciplined as the human body allows. The supreme singer is also one who has impressed an interpretation indelibly on at least one role from the standard repertory. Each of my memories of those great singers is an accessible pleasure still, and my gratitude is commensurate with my luck. But a decade after her retirement from the Met and from opera, I'm confident in saying that no singer in my reach -- or available on record -- has surpassed the vocal achievement of Leontyne Price. A serious argument could be made that no other singer has equaled the full panoply of her career in its beauty of endowment and discipline, in stamina and intelligence, in dramatic and stylistic variety. And while Price has never lacked enormous audiences, adulation and praise -- she became, by the early 1960s, a national emblem of excellence -- the actual scope of her accomplishment has almost never been acknowledged frankly in her own country. Given the human tendency to underestimate the native prophet, that is less than surprising but sadly true; and true despite the fact that distinguished singers from other countries highly respect Price's work (Corelli, Scotto, Pavarotti and Te Kanawa among them). Foreign critics likewise have often acknowledged her preeminence. The dean of English-language students of vocal performance, J. B. Steane, has written of her, "It might well be proposed that records show her as the best singer of Verdi among the sopranos of this century." And Steane's English colleague Alan Blyth recently described Price's voice as the most beautiful in his long experience of the lyric stage. Elsewhere, I myself have attempted metaphors for her actual sound and effect -- a gorgeous and previously unknown bird suspended over snow-banked mountains at dawn -- but in sober prose I'd suggest that her operatic genius lay in the care with which a voice of staggering glamour and training placed its main gamble on the music itself -- the actual line traced on the air, above a large orchestra, by a Mozart or a Verdi. Virgil Thomson made a similar observation about her recording of Beethoven's "Abscheulicher!" from Fidelio: "She grants full expressivity to the melodic line itself, carefully not placing the expression inside the melody as a personalized dramatic intensity but rather on top of it as a continued outpouring in the bel canto manner." And that finally was it -- she trusted the music to make its own point, if rightly delivered, without excessive sideshows. Anyone who thinks such a trust, and the power to act on such a trust, is a simple or common thing has barely begun to listen to singers. I first heard Leontyne Price when I was a junior at Duke University, in the fall of 1953. I'd gone with friends to New York to attend the Duke/Army game at the Polo Grounds, and in the course of the visit we attended Porgy and Bess at the old Ziegfeld Theatre on Sixth Avenue (where, shortly before, I'd seen Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Antony and Cleopatra and Caesar and Cleopatra). At the center of that famous Gershwin revival, there moved a blazing, striding, soaring young Bess: Price in her first major role. I recall it as a startlingly complete performance from one so young. And since I'd seen and heard Flagstad twice, I already had my standards in order and felt at once that Price was bound for comparable heights. Even as a fellow Southerner, in the teeth of the deadening realities of segregation that prevailed not only throughout the nation but at the Met itself, I sensed that her talent would cut its own path. Though I continued to hear from friends and to read about her growth, I spent the mid-to-late fifties in graduate school in England and didn't hear Price in her groundbreaking appearances on NBC-TV Opera, nor again onstage, for more than a decade. In fact my next encounter with her was the start of a friendship that's been important not only to my pleasure and consolation but to my writing of fiction and poetry, and I met her in a nearly ideal way. When I returned to America from a second round of work in England in 1961-62, I paused in New York for extended discussions with Samuel Barber. He'd read my just-published first novel (A Long and Happy Life) and contacted me to ask if I'd be interested in collaborating with him on an opera that Rudolf Bing intended for the opening of the new Met at Lincoln Center, an event that proved to be more than four years away. Barber and Bing were in full agreement that the work should center on Leontyne Price, who had made her clamorously successful Met debut at the old house in 1961, as Leonora in Il Trovatore -- an occasion not only of artistic moment but of national political weight: the arrival at her own nation's center stage of the first African-American singer to get there in full possession of a world-class voice in its prime. As Barber and I continued meeting through the summer of '62 to develop ideas, Sam soon made clear two strong hopes for the piece. Since his Vanessa was set in Europe, and since the Met was after all an American house, this new opera should have an American subject. But given the highly charged racial atmosphere of the sixties and his desire to avoid subjecting Leontyne to more tensions than she faced already, Sam was determined that the story should not concern itself directly with racial matters. Simultaneously, he was hectically at work on his Piano Concerto, which John Browning was to introduce during the opening festivities at Philharmonic Hall in the autumn. In a matter of months -- for various reasons -- we agreed that our collaboration had come to nothing (as, alas, did Sam's hope for an American subject; he'd rejected all my early suggestions, among them a story centered on the visit of Pocahontas to Jacobean London in 1616). From my point of view, an even better result ensued. In the spring of '62, Sam Barber arranged for the two of us to meet with Price at lunch in the apartment of her legendary teacher and friend, Florence Page Kimball. Miss Kimball herself was warm and welcoming; and while the four of us sat at her handsomely laid table, Leontyne discussed, with disarming openness and laughter, the patch of exhaustion that had compelled her to withdraw in the midst of a performance of La Fanciulla del West during the season just past, her second at the Met. She told us also of her enthusiasm for an imminent recording of Madama Butterfly in Rome (the only recording known to me that reveals the mastery with which Puccini evolved Cio-Cio-San from a character of adolescent pathos to one of mature tragic stature). And with samples of her high pianissimo, she regaled us with an account of her recent effort to calm Herbert von Karajan's worries that, after success at the Met, she'd be "yelling her head off." In years to come, I heard her as Mozart's Donna Anna twice at the new Met. I heard all her Verdi roles (except Elvira in Ernani) there at least once, and I heard her Forza Leonora in a quite different production in San Francisco. I heard her towering San Francisco Ariadne and the later Met Ariadne during which she suffered a throat infection, and I heard her in numerous recitals and orchestral concerts around the nation. Among the most memorable of those nights was an early eighties appearance with the Virginia Symphony in Richmond, when, after a sterling set of arias, she and I sat alone over the remains of a pizza in a hotel suite while -- well past midnight -- she sang me the whole of Barber's Knoxville a cappella. Sam had died only two years before. Those meetings culminated in my attending a superb performance of the Strauss Four Last Songs to open Tanglewood in the summer of '83, then the Met Forza of spring '84. The following year, too ill to attend, I watched her final Aida live on public television with its all-flags-unvanquished Nile scene -- a demonstration for later singers and listeners of the utter indispensability of an artist with (in the words of an older critic) "enough." It occurred to me that night, hearing the ovation at the end of "O patria mia" and seeing her just-controlled response, that for more than three decades she had accepted no artistic challenge for which she did not have what old Southerners called " a generous sufficiency." Since then I've heard Price in her continuing, remarkably vital song career. And always, of course, I've acquired her many studio recordings and a number of tapes from opera performances -- her Vienna Liù with its exquisite delicacy but invincible courage, her winsome and vulnerable yet gravely dignified English-language Tatyana in a Met Eugene Onegin, the monumental Cleopatra of opening night at the Lincoln Center house, her fickle but poignant San Francisco Manon Lescaut, the remarkable ensemble and excitement of a Vienna Trovatore with Pavarotti and Ludwig -- a performance that marked Karajan's return to the State Opera in 1977. But while the recordings still can summon the central fact of her finest stage performances -- the amazing joined luster and power of the voice, the same phenomenon that Lawrence Gilman described in Flagstad's first Met Die Walküre as a "spirit, sculptured astonishingly on the flesh" -- they can give only inevitably dimming memories of the other salient fact of her presence: the now fierce, now tender or frightened, now exalted sight of her haunting face and body worked by a mind of unwavering watchfulness, intelligence and sympathy. Given the size of the chief opera houses of Europe and America -- and the distance of most spectators from the stage -- it's surprising how much nonsense is still talked about opera acting. In fact well over half of most audiences are incapable of seeing more of a performing singer than the general body-outline, the arc of certain large gestures of the head and arms (which is of course why Rossini, even in the smaller houses of his day, demanded "Voce, voce, voce!"). Price's innately strong and graceful body, the imposing architecture of her head and neck, were -- from whatever row of whatever balcony -- uncannily evocative of the thoughts and emotions of her characters. The rocket thrust and rise of the voice, even its duskier mid and lower ranges, delivered her intact to every corner. In the tomb scene of the Met's John Dexter production of Aida, for instance, Price gave the most convincing performance I've ever seen of the emotion of love on the lyric stage. Her final caressing of Domingo's Radamès had an intensely individual blend of eros and sublimity that proved a revelation as Verdi's "O terra, addio" expired around the doomed lovers. For anyone who missed such moments from Price's best stage work, emphatic glimpses of it are available in the rich complexity of her movement in the commercial videotape of her '84 Forza (Home Vision FOR-01), in the closeups of her intensely intimate concert with the New York Philharmonic in '82. And even a cursory look at a tape of her final Aida will show how obediently her leonine face, the great deep eyes and pliant body moved to extend her multilayered meaning to all in her reach, however distant. Fortunately, for the past two years, after a long delay, her series of five Prima Donna albums has become available in excellent CD transfers from RCA. Over a span of fourteen years, from 1965 till 1979, Price recorded a total of forty-eight arias by virtually all major opera composers from Purcell and Handel to Britten and Barber. What's most remarkable about the collection is not simply the variety of styles that she assumes with impeccable poise and entrance but the depth at which she inhabits these core moments from so many roles she never performed in full -- almost incredibly, of the forty-three roles represented with authority in the series, she appeared in only three onstage: Mozart's Donna Anna, Massenet's Thaïs and Poulenc's Mme. Lidoine. Before an old doubter of my claim discounts the achievement out of hand, let him listen carefully to a half-dozen of the most diverse of her operatic assumptions. Hard as a choice is, I'd suggest the early "Thy hand, Belinda," for its lucid grief and the clarity of its English diction; Desdemona's "Salce, salce," for its terror resolved in tranquillity; then a visionary and elated "Depuis le jour"; the ethereal farewell of Poulenc's "Mes filles"; and finally the late but very young "Caro nome" and the Ewigweibliche of her Liebestod. Even that array omits such triumphs as the termagant fury of her Donna Anna, the nimble charm of her Meyerbeer Sélika, the lunar fervor of Dvoák's Rusalka and more. Certain high-water marks in the history of art-making homo sapiens have proven unmatchable till now -- Magdalenian cave painting, Athenian sculpture, Bach and Handel, Nijinsky, Picasso, Martha Graham, Olivier. It's far past time to acknowledge widely that a singing countrywoman of our own -- still happily among us and still at work -- has earned her place long since in such undimmed company. Whether he spoke historically or fancifully, Sam Barber spoke truly when he told me thirty-three years ago that -- moments before her cue to mount the old Met stage for her first Il Trovatore -- Leontyne turned to Florence Kimball: "Miss Kimball, I'm scared to death. What shall I do?" Sam said Miss Kimball pulled a long-stemmed perfect bloom from a nearby abundance and held it up to Leontyne, saying only, "Smell a rose and sing." And so she did. MR. PRICE, a novelist, poet, playwright and essayist, is a professor of English at Duke University.

Miss Price receives The Opera News Award

Click on the title to read the artcle on OPERA NEWS ONLINE.

Welcome to my Leontyne Price Blog!

Yesterday was Miss Price her birthday and I used this occasion to attach this Blog to my website: Leontyne Price "Voice of the Century".

I will publish any news or articles of interest on Miss Price by anyone and by myself.

Thank you soo much for all your comments on my video and audio/slideshow clips I put on YouTube. If you have any questions please be so kind to ask them and I will, to the best of my knowledge, answer all as soon as I read them.

Thanks again, Gregory 

Ode to Miss Price her 81 birthday.