Leontyne Price

American soprano Leontyne Price celebrates her 90th birthday on 10 February. Leonine by name and by nature, she was an indomitable force whose regally assured vocal qualities won over audiences and critics on the recital platform and on record. Why, then, did some critics feel that she was never quite at ease on the operatic stage?

By Benjamin Ivry

LEGENDARY SINGERS

DAVE HECHT

Leontyne Price’s luscious, powerfully textured voice was capable of stunning effect, acclaimed for her mastery in Verdi and Puccini roles. As Amelia, Aida, Liù, Cio-Cio-San, and Leonora from La forza del destino and Trovatore, Price shone. None of her contemporaries outdid the visceral force and conviction with which she hurled the final ‘Maledizione!’ in the aria ‘Pace, pace mio Dio!’ from Verdi’s Forza.

Price’s historic role as one of the first African-American prima donnas at the Metropolitan Opera is well-known, yet her potential seemed at times to overshadow even her great accomplishments. Born in Laurel, Mississippi in 1927, by 1961 she had already suffered a vocal crisis, months after her Metropolitan Opera debut in Il trovatore. She had refused an offer to make her Met debut in 1958 as Aida, on the grounds that her first appearance on America’s leading opera stage should not be as a slave.

By the early 1970s, whether due to subsequent caution or other motives, she had substantially reduced the number of her stage performances each year. She still claimed to interviewers that she aspired to roles such as the Marschallin in Strauss’s Rosenkavalier and recorded some tantalising arias to exacerbate regrets that these performances would never occur. Her rationalisations for these ‘non-events’ were often related to race. In February 1982, Price told a New York Times interviewer that Verdi’s Desdemona – another dream role never essayed onstage – is explicitly meant to be a white woman married to a man of colour. The stage world of Richard Strauss’ operas, she added, was the ‘cream-puff era… How can I, as a black American, defy the finesse by doing it my way?’