The soprano Leontyne Price (born February 10, 1927) is an African American opera singer. She was best known for her Verdi roles, above all Aida, a role to which she became more closely associated than any other singer of the postwar period. Her rise coincided with, and for many came to symbolize, the breakthroughs achieved by African Americans in the 1960s.
Price was born Mary Violet Leontyne Price 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. Leontyne's talent was noticed early and her parents traded the family phonograph for a small piano, which Leontyne played from an early age. The Chisholms, an affluent white family in Laurel, encouraged her studies and often asked her to sing at family events. Aiming for a teaching career, she enrolled in the music education program at Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio, which offered her a scholarship. But she was drawn to singing, and completed her studies in voice. With the assistance of the great bass Paul Robeson and the Chisholms, she obtained a scholarship to study at the Juilliard School, where she became the prized pupil of Florence Page Kimball.
Her first opera performance was in a student production of Verdi's "Falstaff," as Mistress Quickly. In the audience was composer Virgil Thomson, who hired her to sing in a revival of his opera, "Four Saints in Three Acts." After that, Price sang Bess in a successful 1954 revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. During the European tour, she met her future husband, William Warfield, who was singing Porgy. (They were divorced in 1972).
In 1955, NBC Opera engaged Price to sing the lead in Giacomo Puccini's Tosca. The announcement prompted controversy--and some NBC affiliates canceled the broadcast--but her performance in this historic broadcast was a critical success.
Her professional operatic stage debut came in 1957 as Madame Lidoine in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites at the San Francisco Opera. In 1958, she was invited by Herbert von Karajan to make her European operatic debut as Aida at the Vienna State Opera. They collaborated for many years in the opera house (most famously in 1962 in a Salzburg Festival run of Verdi's Il Trovatore), concert hall, and on recordings (Tosca, Carmen, and a popular holiday album, A Christmas Offering).
On July 2, 1958, Price made her debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Her La Scala debut came two years later, on May 21, 1960, again in Aida. Price was the first black singer to sing a leading role in Milan.
On January 27, 1961, Price, having turned down earlier offers because she did not feel ready, made a triumphant debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Leonora in Verdi's Il Trovatore. She received a 42-minute ovation, one of the longest in the Met's history. She subsequently appeared for many years in New York. The New York Times critic Harold Schonberg wrote: "Her voice was dusky and rich in its lower tones, perfectly even in its transitions from one register to another, and flawlessly pure and velvety at the top." Other black artists had sung at the Met since Marian Anderson had broken the race barrier there on January 7, 1955. But Price was the first African-American to become an international star. (Indeed, she arrived at the Met already one.) Price returned often to the Met, notably to sing Cleopatra in the premiere of Samuel Barber's Anthony and Cleopatra, which inaugurated the Met's new house at Lincoln Center in 1966.
Price's broad repertoire included Mozart, Puccini and Richard Strauss, but she was best known for her Verdi. Her farewell operatic appearance was at the Met in 1985, as Aida. She continued to give recitals in which she combined American art songs (including many written for her), French melodies, German lieder, Spirituals, and operatic excerpts.
In September 2001, Leontyne Price came out of retirement to sing in a Carnegie Hall memorial concert for victims of the World Trade Center attacks. She lives in Greenwich Village in New York City.
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