Leontyne Price was born in a black neighborhood of Laurel, Mississippi. Her father James worked in a lumber mill and her mother Katie was a midwife who sang in the church choir. They had waited 13 years for a child, and Leontyne became the focus of intense pride and love. Given a toy piano at age 3, she began piano lessons right away with a local teacher. When she was in kindergarten, her parents traded in the family phonograph as the down payment on an upright piano. At 14, she was taken on a school trip to hear Marian Anderson sing in Jackson, and she remembered the experience as inspirational.
In her teen years, Leontyne accompanied the "second choir" at St. Paul's Methodist Church while singing and playing for the chorus at the black high school. Meanwhile, she often visited the home of Alexander and Elizabeth Chisholm, an affluent white family for whom Leontyne's aunt worked as a laundress. Mrs. Chisholm encouraged the girl's early piano playing, and later noticed her extraordinary singing voice.
Aiming for a teaching career, Price enrolled in the music education program at the all-black Wilberforce College in Wilberforce, Ohio. (This institution split in her junior year and she graduated from the publicly funded half, Central State College.) Her success in the glee club led to solo assignments, and she was encouraged to complete her studies in voice. She sang in the choir with another soon-to-be-famous singer, Betty Allen. With the help of the Chisholms and the famous bass Paul Robeson, who put on a benefit concert for her, she enrolled on a scholarship at the Juilliard School in New York City, where she studied with Florence Page Kimball.
Her first important stage performance was as Mistress Ford in a 1952 student production of Verdi's Falstaff. Shortly thereafter, Virgil Thomson hired her for the revival of his all-black opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. After a two-week Broadway run, Saints went to Paris. Meanwhile, she had been cast as Bess in the Blevins Davis/Robert Breen revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and returned for the opening of the national tour at the Dallas State Fair, on June 9, 1952. The tour visited Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C, and then went on a tour of Europe, sponsored by the U.S. State Department. After appearing in Vienna, Berlin, London, and Paris, the company returned to New York when Broadway's Ziegfeld Theater became available.
On the eve of the European tour, Price married the noted bass-baritone William Warfield, who was singing Porgy in the Davis-Breen production, in a widely covered ceremony at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, with many in the cast in attendance. In his memoir, My Music and My Life, Warfield describes how their careers forced them apart. They were legally separated in 1967, and divorced in 1973. They had no children.
At first, Price planned on a recital career, modeling herself after contralto Marian Anderson, tenor Roland Hayes, Warfield, and other great black concert singers. Occasionally granted leaves from "Porgy," she began championing new songs and song cycles by American composers, including Lou Harrison, John La Montaine, and Samuel Barber.
However, her Bess proved she had the instincts and the voice for the operatic stage, and the Met itself affirmed this by inviting her to sing "Summertime" at a "Met Jamboree" fund-raiser on April 6, 1953, at the Ritz Theater on Broadway. Price was therefore the first African American to sing with the Met, if not at the Met. That distinction went to Marian Anderson, who, on January 7, 1955, sang Ulrica in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera.
Emergence
In November 1954, Price made her recital debut at New York's Town Hall with a program that featured the New York premiere of Samuel Barber's cycle, "Hermit Songs", with the composer at the piano. (They had performed the world premiere the previous fall at the Library of Congress.) Then, opera opened its door to her through TV. In February 1955, she sang Puccini's "Tosca" for NBC-TV Opera, under music director Peter Herman Adler, and became the first black to appear in a leading role in televised opera. Several NBC affiliates (not all Southern) canceled the broadcast in protest.
That spring, Andre Mertens, her agent at Columbia Artists, arranged an audition for the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, then touring with the Berlin Philharmonic. Karajan, impressed, declared her "an artist of the future" and invited her to sing Salome under his baton at La Scala. (On the advice of Miss Kimball and Mertens, she declined.) In 1956 and 1957, Price made recital tours across the U.S. and in India and Australia, sponsored by the U.S. State Department.
Her professional operatic stage debut took place in San Francisco on September 20, 1957, as Madame Lidoine in the U.S. premiere of Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites. A few weeks later, when the Italian soprano Antonietta Stella fell ill with appendicitis, Price stepped in and sang her first Aida on stage. The following May, she accepted Karajan's invitation to make her European debut at the Vienna Staatsoper on May 24, 1958, as Aida. The next year, she returned to Vienna, singing Aida and Pamina in Die Zauberflöte.
Over the next decade, von Karajan conducted Price in many of her greatest performances, in the opera house (Mozart's Don Giovanni, Verdi's Il trovatore and Puccini's Tosca), in the concert hall (Bach's B-minor Mass, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Bruckner's Te Deum, and the Requiems of Verdi and Mozart), and in the recording studio (complete recordings of Tosca and Carmen, and a bestselling holiday music album A Christmas Offering--all are available on CD).
In 1958, Price made debuts at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (again to replace an indisposed prima donna, Anita Cerquetti), and the Arena di Verona, both in Aida. On May 21, 1960, she made her first appearance at La Scala, again as Aida. (This is sometimes said to be the first appearance by an African American singer in a leading role with Italy's leading company. In fact, Gloria Davy had sung Aida there in 1958, and Mattiwilda Dobbs had sung Elvira, the secondary lead soprano role in Rossini's L'italiana in Algeri".)
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera was slow to invite Price to join the company. In 1958, the Met's general manager Rudolf Bing made a minimal offering for her to sing a single performance of Aïda. She turned this down on the advice of Peter Herman Adler, director of NBC Opera. "Leontyne is to be a great artist," Adler said, according to William Warfield in his autobiography. "When she makes her debut at the Met, she must do it as a lady, not a slave."
A year later, after Bing heard her perform in Il Trovatore at Verona, in a performance with tenor Franco Corelli, he made a much improved offer, this time for several roles, and in January 1961 she made a historic double-debut with Corelli in Trovatore. The ovation at the final curtain lasted at least 35 minutes...and was certainly one of the longest in Met history. (Price claimed her friends had timed it at 42 minutes, and that is the figure used in much of her publicity.) Leontyne Price received the lion's share of the reviewers' praise, and Corelli told Bing the next morning that he did not want to sing with that soprano again, a decision he rescinded.
New York Times critic Harold Schonberg wrote that Price's "voice, warm and luscious, has enough volume to fill the house with ease, and she has a good technique to back up the voice itself. She even took the trills as written, and nothing in the part as Verdi wrote it gave her the least bit of trouble. She moves well and is a competent actress. But no soprano makes a career of acting. Voice is what counts, and voice is what Miss Price has."
In the next few weeks, she added four other role debuts at the Met: Aïda, Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, and Liu in Turandot. Time magazine noted this extraordinary run of in a cover story, and music critics named her "Musician of the Year."
Leontyne Price was the fifth African American to sing leading roles at the Met.However, Price was the first African American to sing multiple leading roles, and the first to earn the Met's top fee. By 1964, according to the Met archives, Leontyne Price was paid $2,750 per performance, on a par with Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi. The only singer who earned more was Birgit Nilsson, who had Wagner more or less to herself, at $3,000 a performance.
In September 1961, Price opened the Met season as Minnie in La fanciulla del West, a sign of her arrival as a Met prima donna. She was the first African American to be invited to open a season. A musicians' strike had threatened to abort the season, but President Kennedy, aware of the event's political importance, sent Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to mediate a settlement, and the Met opened on time.
Her first serious vocal crisis followed. Midway into the second performance of "Fanciulla," Price lost her singing voice and had to shout her lines to the end of the scene. A standby, soprano Dorothy Kirsten, was called to sing the third Act. The newspapers reported that Price had a virus, but Price later said the crisis was as much the result of the psychological pressure of having too much success, too fast. After a "Butterfly" in December, she canceled other appearances and left for a three-month respite in Rome. The following spring, she returned to the Met for a successful performance of her first Tosca in an opera house. (She repeated the role in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Vienna, as well as on tour with the Met in Detroit and St. Louis.)
Over the next decade, Price added seven additional roles at the Met (in chronological order): Elvira in Verdi's Ernani, Pamina in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte, Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Cleopatra in Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, Amelia in Un ballo in maschera, and Leonora in La forza del destino. She was considered most suitable to Verdi's "middle period" heroines, with their high, glowing lines and postures of noble grief and prayerful supplication. She also was the leading exponent of the plaintive soprano part in Verdi's Requiem.
Antony and Cleopatra
Another career milestone came on September 16, 1966, when Price sang Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra by American composer Samuel Barber, commissioned to open the Met's new house at Lincoln Center. Since their first collaborations in 1954, Price and Barber had remained close friends and colleagues, and the composer carefully tailored Cleopatra's to Price's voice, with its sultry overtones and brilliant upper register.
The opera was not a success. Many blamed director Franco Zeffirelli for burying the music under heavy costumes and huge scenery. Others said Bing had underestimated the challenge posted by a new high-tech house. (The expensive new turntable broke down at the dress rehearsal leaving Price trapped briefly inside a pyramid.) Still others complained that Barber's score lacked satisfying set pieces and that it was insufficiently modern. The run was cut short and the opera was never revived at the Met. With the help of Gian Carlo Menotti, Barber later reworked the score for successful productions at the Juilliard School and the Spoleto Festival in Charleston. Barber also prepared a concert suite, combining Cleopatra's two arias, which Price premiered in Washington in 1968 and sang often.
Late opera career
In the late 1960s, Price cut back on opera sharply in favor of recitals and concerts. She was tired, frustrated with the number (and quality) of the Met's new productions for her, and perhaps felt the need to rework her technique as her voice naturally aged. In his memoirs, Sir Rudolf Bing said that Price worried unnecessarily about overexposure.
The three operatic roles she undertook after 1970 brought her less acclaim than those of the previous decade: Giorgetta in Puccini's Il tabarro (in San Francisco), Puccini's Manon Lescaut, and Ariadne in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos (both in San Francisco and New York). She was In January 1973 she sang "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" and "Onward, Christian Soldiers" at the state funeral of President Lyndon Johnson. In October, she returned to the Met to sing Butterfly, for the first time in a decade, and earned a half-hour ovation. In 1976, she sang Aida in a new Met production, with James McCracken as Radames and Marilyn Horne as Amneris, directed by John Dexter. The next year, she renewed her partnership with von Karajan by singing the soprano solo in the Brahms Requiem with the Berlin Philharmonic, on a visit to Carnegie Hall, and then performances of Il trovatore in Salzburg and Vienna (where Karajan returning after a 13-year hiatus from the Staatsoper).
In 1977, Price took on her last new role, Strauss' Ariadne, in San Francisco, to enthusiastic reviews. When she brought the role to the Met in 1979, she did less well. She was suffering from a viral infection and had to cancel all but two of eight scheduled performances. Reviewing her first performance, the New York Times critic was not complimentary.
A late triumph occurred in 1981 in San Francisco, when she was asked to step in at the last minute for soprano Margaret Price as Aida, a role she had relinquished from her repertory. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herbert Caen reported that she had insisted on being paid $1 more than the tenor, Luciano Pavarotti. This would have made her, for the moment, the highest-paid opera singer in the world. The opera house denied this.
After final revisits in her most famous roles...in San Francisco, Forza, Carmélites, Il Trovatore, and more Aidas, and, at the Met, Forza and Il Trovatore--Price gave her operatic farewell at the Met on January 3, 1985, in Aida. The performance was broadcast on PBS. After taking "an act or two to warm up", wrote Times' critic Donal Henahan, she produced "pearls beyond price." Her performance of the Act III aria, "O patria mia", earned a three-minute ovation, a moment that PBS' director Brian Large captured in a memorable sustained close-up. In 2007, PBS viewers voted this the #1 "Great Moment" in 30 years of "Live from the Met" telecasts.
In all, Price sang 201 performances for the Met, in 16 roles, in the house and on tour, including galas. (She was absent for three seasons—1970—71, 1977—78, and 1980-81—and sang only in galas in 1972-73, 1979—80, and 1982-83.)
Post-operatic career
For the next dozen years, she performed concerts and recitals. Her recital programs were framed by her longtime accompanist David Garvey and typically combined French mélodies, German Lieder, with Spirituals, an aria or two, and a group of American art songs by Barber, Ned Rorem, and Lee Hoiby. She made biennial recital and concert visits to the major American cities and university music series. She gave recitals in Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, Lucerne, and, to great acclaim, at the Salzburg Festival (1975, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981, and 1984).
With time, Price's voice became darker and heavier, but her upper register held up well and the conviction and joy in her singing always spilled over the footlights. On November 19, 1997, she gave a recital at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that turned out to be her last.
Price avoided the term African American, preferring to call herself an American, even a "chauvinistic American." She summed up her philosophy thus: "If you are going to think black, think positive about it. Don't think down on it, or think it is something in your way. And this way, when you really do want to stretch out, and express how beautiful black is, everybody will hear you."
Price gave several master classes at Juilliard and other schools. In 1997, she wrote a children's book version of Aida, which became the basis for a hit Broadway musical by Elton John and Tim Rice in 2000.
In October 2001, at age 74, Price was asked to come out of retirement and sing in a memorial concert in Carnegie Hall after the September 11 attacks. With James Levine at the piano, she sang a favorite spiritual, "This Little Light of Mine", followed by an unaccompanied "God Bless America", capping it with a bright, easy high B-flat. She lives in Greenwich Village in New York City.
