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.