Soul in Opera: Leontyne Price

Acclaimed opera diva Leontyne Price was born Mary Violet Leontyne Price on February 10, 1927 in Laurel, Mississippi. She rose from the segregated South to international fame and became the first Black "superstar" at the once-segregated Metropolitan Opera. For almost 40 years, she was one of America's most beloved and widely recorded sopranos. She called her singing "soul in opera."

Leontyne Price’s father worked in a lumber mill and her mother was a midwife with a rich singing voice. They had waited 13 years for a child, and Leontyne became their focus of intense pride and love. Her parents gave her a toy piano at age 3 and 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 10, she was taken on a school trip to Jackson, Mississippi to hear Marian Anderson sing. She often visited the home of Alexander and Elizabeth Chisholm, an affluent White family for whom Leontyne's aunt worked as a maid. Mrs. Chisholm encouraged her early piano playing, and later noticed her extraordinary singing voice.

Originally aiming for a teaching career, Ms. Price enrolled in the music education program at 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 completed her studies in voice. With the help of the Chisholms and the famous Paul Robeson, who put on a benefit concert for her, she enrolled as a scholarship student at The Juilliard School in New York City.

Her first important stage performance was in a 1952 student production in Verdi's Falstaff. Shortly thereafter she performed in the revival of the 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 revival of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and returned for the opening of the national tour in Dallas, on June 9, 1952. The tour visited Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C, and then went on a tour of Europe. After stops in Vienna, Berlin, London, and Paris, the company returned to New York when Broadway's Ziegfield Theater became available for a "surprise" run.

Meanwhile, on the eve of the European tour, Price had married the man who had sung Porgy, the noted bass-baritone William Warfield, 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.

At first, Price had aimed for a recital career, in the footsteps of Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes, Warfield, and other great Black singers to whom American opera houses were closed. She was granted leaves from "Porgy" to sing concerts, where she championed new works by American composers.

Opera proved a stronger calling. She had been drawn to the big stage since hearing Ljuba Welitsch sing Salome at the Met while she was a student at Juilliard, and as Bess she had proved she had the instincts and the voice for opera. The Met confirmed this when she was invited to sing "Summertime" at a "Met Jamboree" fund-raiser on April 6, 1953 at the Ritz Theater on Broadway.

In November 1955, Price made her recital debut at New York's Town Hall. In February, she sang the title role of Puccini's "Tosca" for NBC-TV Opera. She was the first Black to appear in televised opera. Southern NBC affiliates canceled the broadcast. In 1956 and 1957, Price made recital tours across the country and traveled abroad to India and Australia, sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

Her opera house debut was in San Francisco on September 20, 1957. A few weeks later, when the Italian soprano Antonietta Stella fell ill with appendicitis, she stepped in and sang her first staged Aida. She was invited to make her European debut as Aida on May 24, 1958. Over the next decade Price starred in some of her greatest performances, in the opera house, in the concert hall, and in the recording studio.

On January 27, 1961, Price arrived at the Met, in a double-debut with the Italian tenor Franco Corelli, that ended in a 42-minute ovation, one of the longest ever recorded in the Met's history. Price's third Act aria won 15 minutes of applause. The next day, 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." Corelli, infuriated by Price's acclaim, said afterwards he would never sing with her again. (He did.)

Over 24 years, Price sang in 201 Met performances, in 16 roles, at the house and on tour, including galas. Her timing had been careful. After receiving an invitation to sing a single Aida at the Met, after her Covent Garden success in 1958, Peter Herman Adler, director of NBC Opera, had advised her to turn it down, warning about being stereotyped as the Ethiopian princess. Adler said, according to Warfield, "Leontyne is to be a great artist. When she makes her debut at the Met, she must do it as a lady, not a slave."

When Price arrived at the Met three years later, she had a strong European reputation and her first recordings out on RCA, and could bargain for several roles. She sang five in her first three months. Her impact landed her on the cover of Time magazine and she was named "Musician of the Year" by Musical America. In subsequent years, encouraged by her success, other Black singers went on to make world careers, including Martina Arroyo, Shirley Verrett, Grace Bumbry, Jessye Norman, and Kathleen Battle.

In her later years, Price's voice became darker and heavier, but the upper register held up remarkably well, and the conviction and joy in her singing spilled over the footlights to sold-out houses. On November 19, 1997, when she was a few months shy of 71, she gave a recital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that turned out to be her last. After her retirement from the opera stage in 1985, she gave recitals for another dozen years. Price continued to teach 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 out of retirement to sing in a memorial concert in Carnegie Hall for victims of 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, well placed high B-flat.

Among her many honors are the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Kennedy Center Honors, the National Medal of Arts, numerous honorary degrees, and nineteen Grammy Awards, including a special Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, more than any other classical singer. In 2005 talk show host Oprah Winfrey honored Price and 24 other influential Black women at a Legends Ball.

Leontyne Price once 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."

In March 2007, on BBC Music magazine's list of the "20 All-time Best Sopranos" based on a poll of British music critics and BBC presenters, Leontyne Price placed fourth, after, in order, Maria Callas, Dame Joan Sutherland, and Victoria de los Angeles.