A Voice of Incomparable Price

One of my favorite authors once wrote a line to the effect of “the person you have become, through sheer hard work and adversity, is just as much if not more the true self than the person you started out as.”

Robertson Davies wrote the line referring to a young soprano, but the person who brought the line to my mind was an old soprano: Leontyne Price. And what an amazing soprano! Take a listen to a relatively unknown aria—Song to the Moon, from Dvorak’s Rusalka.



OK—now you can hear why BBC’s Music Magazine in 2007 listed her among the 20 best sopranos. (She came in number four, after Callas, Sutherland, and de los Ángeles.)

And she has an interesting story—she was born in Laurel, Mississippi to parents of limited means. Which, oddly, may have been a break; the schools were strictly segregated, but she has fond memories of the teachers, all of whom were devoted to their students. (In one anecdote, Price admits that the Home Economics teacher had told her, “Leontyne, you’ll never be a great housekeeper.” Somehow, Price manages to make this remark self-deprecating and funny—as she is all throughout the interview.)

So Price, as an older teenager, worked cleaning for a prominent white couple—who were sufficiently impressed to ask Price’s parents if they couldn’t send her off to Juilliard. With their help—as well as a benefit concert from Paul Robeson—she got there.

Like Marian Anderson, born thirty years earlier, Price made her career in Europe before attacking the United States. And when she got there, as she tells New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini, she had faced some of the toughest critics and audiences in the world. So when she was to make her Metropolitan Opera debut—was she fazed? Yes but mostly no. However, she did have a little prayer: Jesus, you got me into this; now, get me out!

Well, Jesus came through—she got a 42-minute ovation; it was one of the longest ovations at the Met.

Asked to describe her voice, Price admits to being a spinto—a rare breed of soprano who has a flexible, lyric voice that can be pushed to a more dramatic, powerful voice. Here’s Price singing Vissi d’Arte, from Puccini’s Tosca.

And just to hear a dramatic soprano perform the same aria—here’s the incredible Birgit Nilsson, a dramatic soprano who could single-handedly take on an orchestra of 120 furiously playing instrumentalists, plus a chorus of dozens, and still make herself very much heard. Oh, and do it for five hours, and repeat the whole thing the next day.



She had thought, initially, to be a recitalist, and she had a close friendship with the composer Samuel Barber, who wrote his Hermit Songs for her. And though another one of Barber’s masterpieces, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, was premiered by another soprano—Eleanor Steber—Price has a special affinity for the piece. Like both Barber and the lyricist James Agee, Price’s father had just died. And so this piece—a nostalgic look at parents on porches, small-town life, kids playing amid the sounds of crickets—had special meaning for Price.



And it was for Price that Barber composed his second opera—an opera that still attracts controversy: Antony and Cleopatra, which the Metropolitan Opera commissioned to open the new hall in 1966. It was a fiasco—Franco Zeffirelli created a ghastly stage setting, the orchestra was under-rehearsed, and the stage machinery was acting up. At one point, Price got stuck in a pyramid and couldn’t get out. But there she was—still singing away!

Barber never quite got over it—he drank more and more, and wrote less and less. Price shook it off and went on with her career—she sang her last performance in 1997—and she was seventy at the time. That, for a singer, is extraordinary.

I’ve no idea how old she was when she did the interview below with Tommasini, but she’s clearly no spring chicken. Yet she sings in the shower every morning, and gets up to the F above high C. Then she tells herself two things—if she can do that F, her high C will be right there. Oh, and also that yes, she has the energy to go downstairs and eat breakfast.

She is, after all, an extraordinary artist—noble, funny, self-deprecating, and yet keenly aware that she has had both a great gift and has worked mightily to use it well. W. Somerset Maugham, in a short story, portrayed a great singer as a kind of monster of egotism and ruthlessness.

Price is the absolute opposite.