"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.