| Leontyne Price |
Website Links For Leontyne |
Information AboutLeontyne Price |
|
She is also a witty woman whose many ''bon mots'' have entered opera lore. Once, when she was appearing in Atlanta as Minnie, the cowgirl lead in Puccini's ''La Fanciulla del West,'' Met general manager Rudolf Bing had to tell her she could not stay at the whites-only hotel with the rest of the Met company. She looked at him and said, "Don't worry, Mr. Bing, I'm sure you can find a place for me and the horse." Price was born in a segregated black neighborhood of Laurel, Mississippi . Her father worked in a lumber mill and her mother was a Midwife with a rich singing voice. When Leontyne's musical talent showed itself early, her parents traded in the family Phonograph for a small toy piano for her to play. An affluent white family in Laurel, the Chisholms, also encouraged Leontyne and asked her to sing at family events. Aiming for a teaching career, Price enrolled in the music education program at Central State University , Wilberforce, Ohio , but she completed her studies in voice. With the help of the famous bass Paul Robeson and the Chisholms, she enrolled as a scholarship student at the Juilliard School in New York City , where she became the star pupil of Florence Page Kimball. Her first stage performance was as Mistress Quickly in a student production of Verdi's '' Falstaff ''. The composer and critic Virgil Thomson heard one of those performances and, impressed, hired her for a Broadway revival of his all-black opera, ''Four Saints in Three Acts,'' in April 1952. She gained her first accolades as Bess in the 1954 revival of George Gershwin 's '' Porgy And Bess .'' Starting in Dallas, the Blevins Davis/Robert Breen production toured the U.S. and Europe, and returned for a run on Broadway. After the international tour, Price and William Warfield , an admired concert and movie (''Showboat'') singer who had been her Porgy, were married at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem . (They were divorced in 1972 .) In , precise English diction, and the shining top notes that would be one of her hallmarks. She performed several other roles for NBC Opera, including Pamina in ''Magic Flute'' and Donna Anna in ''Don Giovanni.'' In 1957, Leontyne Price made her opera house debut as Madame Lidoine in the American premiere of ''Dialogues of the Carmelites'' at the San Francisco Opera . That year she auditioned at Carnegie Hall for the Austrian conductor Herbert Von Karajan , who confessed her singing "gave him goose pimples" and leaped to the stage to accompany her himself. Afterwards, he invited her to make her first European operatic appearances at the Vienna State Opera, where he was the incoming intendant. She made her debut in Vienna in 1958 as Pamina in ''The Magic Flute,'' after which she also sang Aida. Price and von Karajan had an extraordinary musical rapport that bore fruit in the opera house (notably in Salzburg performances of Mozart's ''Don Giovanni'' and Verdi's '' Il Trovatore ''), the concert hall (in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and the Verdi Requiem), and the recording studio, where they produced complete sets of ''Tosca'' and ''Carmen'', and one of the most popular holiday music albums, ''A Christmas Offering''. (All have been consistently available. A notable 1967 Verdi Requiem from the Teatro alla Scala, with Price, Fiorenza Cossotto, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Luciano Pavarotti (making his Scala debut), with von Karajan conducting, and filmed by French director Henri Clouzot, is available on DVD.) On July 2 , 1958 , Price made her debut, as Aida, at London's Royal Opera House , Covent Garden . Two years later, on May 21 , 1960 , she appeared at Milan's La Scala, again as Aida, becoming the first black singer to sing a leading role in that capital of Italian opera. |
|
|