Leontyne Price

Mary Violet Leontyne Price (born February 10, 1927) is an American opera singer (soprano). She was best known for her Verdi roles, above all Aida, a role that she is said to have "owned" for almost 30 years. Her rise to international fame in the 1950s and 60s was a visible triumph over institutional racism, and she set standards for quality and longevity that have been equaled by few, if any, American sopranos.

In an exciting generation of sopranos that included Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Joan Sutherland, and Birgit Nilsson, Price was a leading interpreter of the lirico spinto (Italian for "pushed lyric", or middleweight) roles of Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, as well as of roles in several operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. She sang with rich, sensual, sometimes husky timbre, glowing high notes, and expressive phrasing. Her voice ranged from A below Middle C to the E above High C. (She said she sang high Fs "in the shower").

She is a quotable woman whose wit has entered opera lore. Once, when discussing whether she would sing in Atlanta as Minnie, the cowgirl lead in Puccini's La Fanciulla del West, the Met's general manager Rudolf Bing warned her she wouldn't be able to stay in the same segregated hotel with the 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."

Because of her exceptional technique and great care of her voice, she gave recitals across the U.S. and in Europe long after her retirement from the opera stage. Among her many honors are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1965), the Kennedy Center Honors (1980), the National Medal of Arts (1985), numerous honorary degrees, and 19 Grammy awards, including a special Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, more than any other classical singer.

Life and career

Roots

Leontyne 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. They had waited 13 years for a child, and Leontyne became the focus of intense pride and love. She began piano at three and a half, playing on a white toy piano until her parents traded in the family phonograph as the down payment on an upright piano. In her teen years, Leontyne accompanied the "second choir" at St. Paul's Methodist Church while studying music with Mrs. Hattie McInnis, who also led the chorus at the black high school. Meanwhile, she often visited the home of Alexander and Elizabeth Chisholm, an affluent white family, where Leontyne's aunt worked as a maid. Mrs. Chisholm encouraged the girl's early piano playing, and later noticed her extraordinary singing voice. Aiming for a teaching career, Price enrolled in the music education program at Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio. Her success in the glee club led to solo assignments, and 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 studied with Florence Page Kimball.

Her first stage performances were as student performances as Mistress Ford in Verdi's Falstaff Shortly thereafter, Virgil Thomson hired her for the revival of his 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 Blevins Davis/Robert Breen's revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and returned, with a day's rehearsal, for the opening of the national tour at the Dallas State Fair, on June 9, 1952, singing alongside William Warfield's Porgy. The tour visited Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C, and then went to Europe, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, which saw Porgy as a useful PR tool in the Cold War. After visiting Vienna and Berlin, the production settled in for a two-month stay in London. A stop in Paris followed, to the most enthusiastic reception of all, but it was cut short when New York's Ziegfield Theater became available for a "surprise" run on Broadway that lasted for 305 performances.

Meanwhile, just before the European tour, Price and Warfield had been married at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, with many in the cast in attendance. In his memoirs My Music and My Life, Warfield describes how their careers soon forced them apart. Although they lived apart since the late 1950s, according to Warfield's memoirs, they were legally separated in 1967 and divorced in 1972.

Price's first ambition was for a concert and recital career, following the pattern of contralto Marian Anderson, tenor Roland Hayes, Warfield, and other great black singers who had found American opera houses closed. In the early 50s, Leontyne made a specialty of premiering works by American composers, including Lou Harrison, John La Montaine, and Samuel Barber. On October 30, 1953, she sang the premiere of Barber's "Hermit Songs" at the Library of Congress, with the composer at the piano. On November 14, 1954, she made her New York recital debut at Town Hall, with Barber again accompanying her in "Hermit Songs."

Opera proved the stronger calling. She had been trained at Juilliard in opera as well as song, and her Bess had proved she had the voice and instincts for the big stage. The Met itself acknowledged this when it invited her to sing "Summertime" at a "Met Jamboree" fund-raiser on April 6, 1953, at the Ritz Theater on Broadway. Thus Price seems to have been the first African American to sing with the Met and for the Met, if not at the Met in a full opera. That distinction went to Marian Anderson, the great contralto who, on January 7, 1955, sang Ulrica in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. The occasion was important, but the role was secondary, racially typecast (Ulrica is specified in the libretto as a Negress), and came late in Anderson's career. The real barrier-breaker would be a young singer who made a career in the leading soprano roles.

Emergence

In 1955, Price was engaged by NBC-TV Opera to sing in an English-language performance of Giacomo Puccini's Tosca. The casting was controversial, and several NBC affiliates refused to carry the broadcast. In the event, wrote Olin Downes of the Times, Price's "voice was superbly equal to all demands made upon it, in the dramatic character of the upper register, the warmth and sensuousness of the tone throughout and the sincerity and feeling everywhere evident." A CD of the performance reveals a young soprano with a fluttery vibrato, careful English enunciation, and easy, shining top notes. A few weeks later, she auditioned at Carnegie Hall for the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, who was in New York on his first tour with the Berlin Philharmonic. Declaring her "an artist of the future," he invited her to sing Salome with him at La Scala. (She declined.) In 1956 and 1957, sponsored by the U. S. State Department, Price made recital tours to India and Australia.

Her professional stage debut was in San Francisco on September 20, 1957, as Madame Lidoine in the U.S. premiere of Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites. A few weeks later, she filled in on short notice for Antonietta Stella (ill with an appendicitis) and sang her first staged Aida. Meanwhile, von Karajan, now intendant of the Vienna Staatsoper, invited her to appear as Aida on May 24, 1958. The next year, she returned to Vienna as Aida, and as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte.

Over the next decade, Karajan led Price in some of her greatest performances, in the opera house (in Mozart's Don Giovanni, Verdi's Il Trovatore and Puccini's Tosca), the concert hall (Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and the Verdi Requiem [[1]]), and the recording studio, where they produced complete sets of Tosca and Carmen, and a still popular holiday music album A Christmas Offering. All are available on CD. Their special rapport can be seen in a 1967 performance of the Verdi Requiem from La Scala, filmed by the French film noir director Henri-Georges Clouzot, and available on DVD.

Price continued her string of triumphant European debuts, appearing as Aida at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and the Arena di Verona (both in 1958), and, on May 21, 1960, at La Scala, again as Aida. (Mattiwilda Dobbs had been the first African American to sing there, as Elvira in Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri in 1953.)

Arrival

On January 27, 1961, Price arrived at the Met, in a debut that was made even more tumultuous by the co-debut of tenor Franco Corelli. The opera was Verdi's Il Trovatore and the performance ended in a 42-minute ovation. 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." Schonberg described Corelli as an exciting but unpolished tenor. Corelli was furious at being overshadowed, and told Bing the next day, "I never want to sing with that soprano again." (He did.)

Price's Met arrival was more than a musical event. The Civil Rights movement was gaining momentum, and many friends and sympathizers had traveled to New York from the South to cheer her on.

Since Marian Anderson's debut in 1955, other black singers had sung leading roles at the Met: Robert McFerrin, a baritone and father of popular singer Bobby McFerrin, sang Amonasro in Aida in 1955 and Rigoletto the next season; the soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs sang Gilda (with Leonard Warren) in 1956; that year, the dancer Geoffrey Holder performed in the Aida ballet sequence; in 1958, soprano Gloria Davy sang Aida, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, and, the next year, Nedda in Pagliacci; also in 1959, the soprano Martina Arroyo sang the offstage Celestial Voice in Don Carlo. Price, however, was the first African American to sing multiple leading roles to acclaim in the leading opera houses, at home and abroad. She was also the first to earn the Met's top fee. A 1964 memo revealed that she was paid $2,750 per performance, on a par with Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi. Only Birgit Nilsson, who had Wagner roles more or less to herself, earned more: $3,000.

Her timing had been carefully judged. After her NBC Tosca, Bing had invited her to the Met for a single Aida, but she turned him down on the advice of Peter Herman Adler, director of NBC Opera. "Leontyne is to be a great artist," Adler said, according to Warfield. "When she makes her debut at the Met, she must do it as a lady, not a slave." As a result, Price arrived at the Met, at age 33, with several roles already tested, a huge European reputation, and the first recordings out under an exclusive RCA Victor contract. She was put on the cover of Time magazine. After her arrival, other African-American singers went on to make world careers, including Arroyo, Shirley Verrett, Grace Bumbry, Jessye Norman, and Kathleen Battle.

Met career

In 24 seasons at the Met, Price sang 201 performance, in 16 different roles, at the house and on tour. In her first season, she sang the Trovatore Leonora, Aida, Liù in Turandot, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, and Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly. In her second, she added Minnie in La Fanciulla del West and Tosca. She was chosen to open the 1961-2 season, a first for an African American, in "Fanciulla." When a musicians' strike threatened delay, Price appealed to Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to mediate. The strike was settled, the Met opened on time, and reviewers praised Price's singing and acting.

Midway in the second act of the second performance, she faced a different crisis: her singing voice grew thin, then disappeared, and she shouted her way to the end of the scene. Soprano Dorothy Kirsten took over for the final Act. The cause seems to have been a virus--and overwork. Others said that Minnie taxed her essentially lyric voice. Price sang Fanciulla once more at the Met, in December, and twice on tour the following spring, in Cleveland and Dallas, but never again. Meanwhile, after a single "Butterfly" in December, she canceled her remaining winter dates. Her manager said her doctor had diagnosed her with "acute physical exhaustion" and ordered her to take a month off. In March 1962, she was back in the saddle, singing "Tosca" in Vienna, and the following month the same role at the Met, followed by a packed Met spring tour.

That spring Price did not sing in Atlanta on the Met's tour. A "high Met official"--who could only have been Bing--said she would come to Atlanta "when she could sing in an unsegregated theater, stay in an unsegregated hotel, and ride from the airport in an unsegregated taxi." Apparently those conditions had been met when, on May 14, 1964, she sang in Don Giovanni at the Fox Theater in a performance attended by Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr., and some of his backers. After the Act I aria, "Or sai chi l’onore," the audience rose for a standing ovation that "seemed to be unending," bass Justino Diaz recalled in Opera News. "Bing was in the wings. She fell into his arms. ‘I did it, Boss, I did it,’ she said. And they both had tears in their eyes. Bing said, ‘I knew you could do it. I knew you could.'"

Meanwhile, the whites-only Piedmont Driving Club had canceled its traditional post-performance dinner for the cast, saying it was redecorating. Bing had told them them if Price couldn't attend, no one in the company would. Bing had also made a point of taking Price to dinner at his hotel after their arrival. "As we walked in," he writes in his memoirs, "there was a sudden hush, which I greatly enjoyed."

In '62-63, she added Elvira in Verdi's "Ernani" to her Met roles. Over the next few seasons added five more roles at the Met: Pamina in Mozart's Zauberflöte, Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte, Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and two more "middle period" Verdi heroines, Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera and Leonora in La Forza del Destino. Her success in the latter, with their high lines and postures of noble supplication, was extraordinary, and the five middle-period Verdi roles and the Requiem became Price's core repertoire for the next two decades.

Antony and Cleopatra

Another career milestone came on September 16, 1966, when Price sang Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra by American composer Samuel Barber, commissioned to open the Met's new house at Lincoln Center. Price and Barber had met in Miss Kimball's studio and become friends and frequent collaborators. After the success of the "Hermit Songs" in 1954, Barber asked Price to sing the soprano solo in his Prayers of Kierkegaard, in its U.S. premiere in 1959 with the Boston Symphony. In the new opera, Barber said he tailored "every vowel" of Cleopatra's music to Price's voice, and often carried fresh music to her home to work on with her.

It was not a success. Many felt that director Franco Zeffirelli buried the music under a multitude of extras and animals, floating steel clouds, and a rotating Sphinx. A reviewer said Price's heavy costume made her look like Sitting Bull, and that was the slimmed-down version! At the dress rehearsal the expensive turntable broke down, and on opening night Price found herself briefly trapped inside a pyramid. Critics praised her singing, but found Barber's score lacking in dramatic focus and satisfying set pieces; there was no love duet, for example. It ran for eight performances, and was never revived at the Met. With the help of his close friend Gian Carlo Menotti, Barber revised the opera in 1973, and the new version (with a new love duet) played to better reviews in a Juilliard production, in Charleston, S.C., and in Chicago. In 2004, Antony and Cleopatra was given in concert format at Carnegie Hall, with Carol Vaness as Cleopatra. Ever loyal to Barber, Price performed the death-scene ("Give me my robe") often in concerts, including a New York Philharmonic Pension Fund Concert in 1979, and for Juilliard's 80th anniversary in 1985 (on YouTube.com).

Late opera career

In the 1970s, Price cut back on opera appearances in favor of recitals and concerts. She explained her reasons at various times as a need to recharge her batteries, to avoid overexposure, and frustration with the Met's failure to mount new productions for her. It is possible that she also needed a period of withdrawal to adjust to the natural changes in her aging vocal instrument.

After 1970, she added only three new roles to her repertoire: Giorgetta in Puccini's Il Tabarro (in San Francisco), Puccini's Manon Lescaut, and Ariadne in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos (in both San Francisco and New York). In January 1973 she sang Onward, Christian Soldiers at the state funeral of President Lyndon Johnson. In October, she sang Madame Butterfly again at the Met, after a decade, and with an intensity that won her a half-hour ovation. In 1976, she sang Aida in a new Met production with Marilyn Horne (directed by John Dexter). The next year, she renewed her partnership with von Karajan, singing the Brahms Requiem with the Berlin Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall, and then Il Trovatore in Salzburg and Vienna.

In 1977, Price sang her last new role--Strauss' Ariadne--in San Francisco, to enthusiastic reviews. When she sang the role at the Met in 1979, she was suffering from a virus; she canceled the first and last of three performances, and the Times reviewer didn't have much good to say about the second.

In a late-career triumph in 1981, Price stepped in for an ailing colleague (the Welsh soprano Margaret Price) to sing Aida in San Francisco, with Pavarotti as the Radames. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herbert Caen reported that she had insisted on being paid $1 more than Pavarotti, which would have made her, for the moment, the highest paid opera singer in the world. The opera house denied this. Pavarotti later said he wept in the wings listening to her beautiful singing of "O patria mia."

After revisiting several early roles in San Francisco (Forza, Carmélites, Il Trovatore, and more Aidas), Leontyne Price bade farewell to opera on January 3, 1985, in Aida, nationally telecast from the Met. This was her 41st Aida with the company. After taking "an act or two to warm up," wrote the "Times" chief critic Donal Henahan, she produced "pearls beyond price," notably the Act III aria, "O patria mia," which received a five-minute ovation, and the duet, "La tra la foreste vergine." (Both have been on YouTube.com.)

Another Times critic, John Rockwell, wrote more harshly of the first performance in the run, on Dec. 21: "The 'O patria mia' in the third act and the final duet had many of the opulent vocal characteristics that distinguished Miss Price in her prime. Unfortunately, they also had many of the self-indulgent vocal mannerisms, the stolid acting and the hoarse lower register with its rough linkage to the top that also marked her operatic prime."

Sunset

For the next dozen years, she concentrated on concerts and recitals. Her recital programs, chosen with her longtime accompanist David Garvey, combined French mélodies, German Lieder, Spirituals, an aria or two, and a group of American art songs, many of them written for her, by composers including Barber, Ned Rorem and Lee Hoiby. In 1982, Price sang for the Daughters of the American Revolution at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., dedicating her performance to Marian Anderson, who had been famously excluded from the venue in 1939. In addition to regular stops in the major American cities and university concert series, Price gave recitals in Vienna (1970, 1978), Paris (1972), and at the Salzburg Festival in 1974, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981, and 1984.

In later years, Price's voice became darker and thicker, but the upper register held up remarkably well, and the conviction and joy in her singing spilled over the footlights and earned her affectionate ovations from sold-out houses. On November 19, 1997, when she was 70, she gave a recital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that turned out to be her last.

Price avoided the term African American, preferring to call herself an American, even a "chauvinistic American." She 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."

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, Price came out of retirement to sing in a memorial concert in Carnegie Hall for victims of the September 11 attacks. She sang a favorite spiritual, "This Little Light of Mine," with James Levine at the piano, followed by an unaccompanied "God Bless America," capping the anthem with a perfectly placed high B-flat that, as a reviewer put it, "unfurled from the stage like Old Glory itself." She lives in Greenwich Village in New York City.

Recordings

Leontyne Price is one of the most recorded singers of the 20th century. Her many commercial recordings include three complete sets of Trovatore, two of Forza, two of Aïda, two of the Verdi Requiem, two of Tosca, and an Ernani, Ballo, Carmen, Madama Butterfly, Cosí Fan Tutte, Don Giovanni (as Donna Elvira), Il Tabarro and (her final complete opera recording) Ariadne auf Naxos. Highlights from "Porgy and Bess" (including music for the other female leads Clara and Serena) were recorded with Warfield, under Skitch Henderson. Her many anthologies include five "Prima Donna" albums of selected arias, two collections of Strauss arias, recitals of French and German art songs, two albums of Spirituals, and a single crossover disc, Right as Rain, with Andre Previn. Her Barber recordings, including the "Hermit Songs," scenes from Antony and Cleopatra, and "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," were gathered on a CD titled "Leontyne Price Sings Barber." Her first operatic recital album, made in 1960, and known as the "blue album" for its blue cover, captures her vocal personality at its most liquid and spontaneous. It has been reissued several times on CD.

After a 1976 dispute with RCA over an Otello with Plácido Domingo--Price had been announced as Desdemona, but Renata Scotto got the job--Price made several late recordings for London/Decca and EMI/Angel. In 1996, to honor her 70th birthday, RCA brought out a deluxe 12-CD box of selections from her recordings, with an accompanying book, titled "The Essential Leontyne Price." Copies are hard to find; one was recently for sale on EBay for $650. Meanwhile, historical recordings continue to appear. In 2002, RCA unearthed a tape of her 1965 Carnegie Hall recital debut and issued it in its "Rediscovered" series. In 2005, Bridge Records released her 1954 Library of Congress recital, including the "Hermit Songs," Henri Sauguet's song-cycle "La Voyante," and songs by Poulenc.

Recordings that got away: After Philadelphia Orchestra performances of "Messiah" in 1958 with Warfield and Price, Columbia (which had the orchestra under contract) discussed a deal with RCA (which had Price) to make a recording. According to Warfield, RCA agreed to lend Price if Columbia loaned them their prize soprano, Eileen Farrell. The recording was made in the end wth Farrell. In 1974, RCA planned a Don Giovanni with Price (Donna Anna), Sherrill Milnes (the Don), and Montserrat Caballé (Donna Elvira), but the deal fell through. Many regret that RCA never recorded an album of the American art songs that Price championed in the concert hall, including John La Montaine's "Songs of the Rose of Sharon," Barber's late song cycle "Despite and Still" (dedicated to her), and Lee Hoiby's "Songs for Leontyne." The Breen-Davis "Porgy and Bess" was never recorded or filmed.

Reputation

In his 1974 history of vocal recordings, "The Grand Tradition," the British critic J.B. Steane writes that "one might conclude from recordings that [Price] is the best interpreter of Verdi of the [20th] century." In her autobiography, the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya wrote that hearing Price sing Tosca at the Vienna State Opera in 1962 "left me with the strongest impression I have ever gotten from opera." In his 1983 autobiography, Plácido Domingo writes, "The power and sensuousness of Leontyne's voice were phenomenal - the most beautiful Verdi soprano I have ever heard."

She has also had her critics. Peter G. Davis writes in his book, "The American Opera Singer," that Price had "a fabulous vocal gift that went largely unfulfilled," noting her reluctance to try new roles, criticizing her Tosca for its lack of a "working chest register," and her late Aidas for a "swooping" vocal line. (Listeners can judge for themselves. Scenes are on YouTube.) Others have criticized her stiff technique in florid music, and her occasionally bluesy way with the music.

Much depends on what period of Price's career you are talking about.

From the beginning, Leontyne Price had a personal and vivid way with rhythm and register shifts. She could soar up to a radiant high note, on the front end of the beat (the soft B-flat in the aria "Pace, pace" is an example), or plunge luxuriously into a vat of chocolate, as in Carmen's dismissive phrase: "Mais pas aujourd'hui... c'est cer-tain." She had a quick vibrato, which added to the warm, feminine quality of her voice, and a beautiful legato, the ability to carry the tone smoothly from note to note. Her high G, which for many sopranos is a difficult transition note, was bright and glowing (some called it her "$5,000 note"), and she carried her unique shimmer up to the high C and D and, on recordings, E-flat and E-natural.

In mid-career, her voice became darker and her vocal style stiffer and cooler, with occasional outbreaks of self-indulgent emphasis, including scooping or sliding up to high notes and other "gospel" effects. Von Karajan took her to task for these in rehearsals for the 1977 "Il Trovatore," as Price herself related in an interview in Diva, by Helena Matheopoulos. Later recordings and appearances show she took his advice to heart and sang with a cleaner line and fewer mannerisms.

While her upper register always seems to have come easily, her lower register was, as she told interviewer Stephen Blier, "constant work." Early on, she pushed the difficult lower break in a way that was considered expressive by some, ugly by others; later, while she sang more smoothly in the low-middle range, the notes became breathy and hollow. Still, as TV broadcasts from the 1980s prove (on YouTube.com), she often succeeded in minimizing her weaknesses and recapturing the bright tone and pure style of her youth. Her singing never lost a warm, human quality, and her careful pacing of her career, criticized by some at the time as stingy, proved well-judged.

As for her acting, this too varied over her career. Her Bess was praised for its fire and sensuality. A 1958 CBC broadcast of Aida (Act III only, on a VAI DVD) shows her moving vividly like a caged panther. In the early Met years, critics often praised her acting as well as her singing. Later, she became a stiff, even at times an awkward singer-actress. She herself once said, "I don't expect to win any Academy Awards." On the other hand, a DVD of a 1982 "Live from the Met" TV broadcast of "Forza"--the only available film of Price in a complete opera --shows her carrying herself with compelling dignity.

In March 2007, BBC Music magazine published a list of the "20 All-time Best Sopranos" based on a poll of 21 British music critics and BBC presenters. The poll listed Leontyne Price fourth, after, in order, Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland, Victoria de los Angeles, and one notch above Birgit Nilsson. Naturally, the list was widely criticized.

Quotations

• "Accomplishments have no color."
• "The way I was taught, being black was a plus, always. Being a human being, being in America, and being black, all three were the greatest things that could happen to you. The combination was unbeatable."
• On her attitude when on stage: "I am here and you will know that I am the best and will hear me. The color of my skin or the kink of my hair or the spread of my mouth has nothing to do with what you are listening to."
• On saying no: "You must learn to say no when something is not right for you. If you are an American Beauty Rose, don't try and be a lily. Stay in your own artistic firmament. My mother told me that. And if you are fortunate enough to have a genius [conductor Herbert von Karajan] who likes your instrument, you can't let that make you forget your own individuality."
• "Maria Callas was like a cotton-pickin' hypodermic needle for opera."
• "Art is the only thing you cannot punch a button for. You must do it the old-fashioned way. Stay up and really burn the midnight oil. There are no compromises."
• "Onstage, I feel the most beautiful, complete, fulfilled. I think that's why, in the case of noncompromising career women, parts of our personal lives don't work out. One person can't give you the feeling that thousands of people give you."
• "We should not have a tin cup out for something as important as the arts in this country, the richest in the world. Creative artists are always begging, but always being used when it's time to show us at our best."

Resources

BOOKS

• Sir Rudolf Bing, 5,000 Nights at the Opera: The Memoirs of Sir Rudolf Bing (Doubleday, 1972).
• Peter G. Davis, The American Opera Singer: The Lives and Adventures of America's Great Singers in Opera and Concert from 1825 to the Present (Anchor, 1999).
• Plácido Domingo, My First Forty Years (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).
• Peter G. Davis, The American Opera Singer (Doubleday, 1997).
• Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber, The Composer and His Music (Oxford University Press, 1992).
• Helena Matheopolous, Diva: Sopranos and Mezzo-sopranos Discuss Their Art (Northeastern University Press, 1992).
• Luciano Pavarotti with William Wright, Pavarotti: My Own Story (Doubleday, 1981).
• Stephen Rubin, The New Met (MacMillan, 1974).
• Winthrop Sargeant, Divas (Coward, McCann, Geohegan, 1973).
• J.B. Steane, The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record (Timber Press, 1993).
• Robert Vaughan, Herbert von Karajan (W.W. Norton & Company, 1986).
• Galina Vishneyskaya, Galina, A Russian Story (Harvest/HBJ Book, 1985).
• William Warfield, with Alton Miller, William Warfield: My Music and My Life (Sagamore Publishing, 1991).

ARTICLES

• "From Collard Greens to Caviar: Leontyne Price Reminisces," Opera News, July and August 1985.
• "Reunion: Justino Diaz," by Eric Myers, Opera News, March 2006, Vol. 70, No. 9
• "Time After Time," Stephen Blier reviews "The Essential Leontyne Price" CD collection, Opera News, October 1996
• "The Garbo of Opera," by David Perkins, News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), October 5, 1986
• "Leontyne Price Ill, To Rest for Month," New York Times, December 23, 1961
• "Where Atlanta's 'Big Mules' Relax," Time, Jan. 10 1977 (on 1964 "Don Giovanni" controversy)

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