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Defining Diva
In an era full of great singers, Leontyne Price had a magic that was all her own. PHILIP KENNICOTT pays tribute to a legend.
As Aida in Franco Zeffirelli’s La Scala staging, 1963
E. Piccagliani/Teatro alla Scala/Opera News Archives
Soprano Leontyne Price famously said that perhaps the greatest lesson she learned at Juilliard was this: always sing on interest, never on the principal. Price sang on the recital stage into her sixties and in 2001 performed at the Richard Tucker Gala at seventy-four. When she was interviewed for the 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honors, she confessed that she still likes what she hears when she sings in the shower. So she learned that early lesson well and never spent the extraordinary capital on which her glorious career was built.
I came of age as Price was retiring from the opera stage in the mid-1980s. I remember her at the Met only from a televised concert in 1982, when she sang opera excerpts with Marilyn Horne. To an opera neophyte, the voice was impressive, the dignity, the bearing, the carriage even more so. She struck me as regal, her manners flawless but also slightly distant. She smiled, and so did Horne, but Horne made you want to curl up at her feet, while Price made you sit up straight and brush the lint off your trousers.
Unfortunately, I missed the golden decade of the 1960s, when Price triumphed at the Met with a legendary debut opposite Franco Corelli and later starred in Barber’s ill-fated Antony and Cleopatra,which christened the Met’s new home at Lincoln Center in 1966. So I’ve had a backward-looking engagement with Price’s career, almost entirely through recordings. Only recently have I managed to shed my earliest memories — of a somewhat mannered superstar singing in the splendid isolation of her grandeur and fame. Displacing those youthful impressions of Leontyne the Great and Untouchable with Leontyne the Artist has been a thrilling experience.
Thrilling and disorienting. On recording Price can be a chameleon, her voice full of shifting colors, her performances spanning a disconcerting range from the Apollonian reserve of her song recitals to the terrifying intensity of her operatic persona. In Mozart one sometimes wonders if it’s even the same voice that sang Verdi and Strauss so magnificently. Her magnificent recording of Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 feels like it has been filtered through the horn of an old Victrola or printed in sepia; but she makes Berlioz’s Nuits d’Été sound invigorating and modern, as if written by a composer somewhere in the early decades of the twentieth century.
As a stage artist, Price was defined by a small number of roles in which she was superlative, especially Aida and the Leonoras from Il Trovatore and La Forza del Destino. Until a few years ago, based mainly on the 1969 studio recording made with Plácido Domingo, I thought of her as “one of the finest” exponents of the Trovatore Leonora. Then in 2011 Sony released a recording made at the Met in 1961, a few weeks after her spectacular debut. And with that I dropped all the qualifiers. This aural snapshot of Price at the moment of her triumph, more than a decade before the studio recording, demonstrates the continuity and resiliency of Price’s artistry, and in many ways it is even more exciting than the later traversal. Her voice is refulgent, muscular, supple and brilliant, her phrasing effortless and natural, her characterization astonishingly assured. What many have said of her Aida — that there’s none better — I think can safely be said of this role as well.
And her Aida remains, by itself, a more than sufficient accomplishment to have earned her a place on Parnassus. The elasticity of Price’s voice — the luxurious legato, the daring portamento — underscores the dangerous chromaticism of Verdi’s score, its tendency to slippage and ambiguity. The singing doesn’t seem quite horizontal, a through line of ideas, phrases and melodic episodes; rather it feels fully three-dimensional, as the voice throbs, swells and contracts, suspending any ordinary sense of time. Price’s Aida makes one forget what a claustrophobic opera Aida can be, with so much happening offstage, so many things described rather than witnessed. The magic of her “Ritorna vincitor” is how much it summons, how well it describes, how thoroughly it invokes the forces and events that will eventually crush her. Price was never better than when she found music, and roles, that allowed her to conjure emotion rather than submit to it.
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An early portrait
Opera News Archives |
That is also what made her such a magnificent recitalist. Temperamentally, it’s hard to imagine a character as remote from Aida as the unnamed woman narrator who sings of courtship, marriage, children and death in Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. The texts, by Adalbert von Chamisso, are cloying and treacly, a paean to feminine submission, duty and service. Yet Schumann’s music and Price’s pared-down, quicksilver interpretation create a heartbreaking narrative. If sometimes one wondered whether Price deployed her magnificent decrescendo and pianissimo a bit too promiscuously onstage, here these effects are done with consummate taste and discretion. Each song summons a scene, each scene is perfectly limned, and a miraculously coherent drama gathers force straight through to the end, which is shattering.
Barber’s Knoxville may have been the perfect piece for her — a single moment of time that is suspended over more than a quarter of an hour, its impact almost entirely a matter of slight shadings and nuance. The seeming simplicity of James Agee’s text poses an enormous challenge: how to insinuate into a moment of perfect happiness an awareness of loss, death and our cosmic insignificance? If one were somehow to graph the emotional distance Price covers in this rhapsody, and compare it to anything she did in Strauss or Verdi, the arc would be just as dramatic and precipitous. But it is all contained within the enchanted hush of memory, all done with the voice, from the thin, reedy child’s tone with which she begins and ends the work, through the plaintive, direct appeal of the narrator realizing the inexorable connection between memory and loss, to the emotional exuberance with which she sings of “my people” and “my father who is good to me.” As so often happens with Price’s singing, the voice leaves one with the powerful impression that it isn’t just supported by the accompaniment but rather transforms the ensemble. When the lilting accompaniment that opens this inward drama returns at the end, it has been colored by the memory of her voice and now sounds darker and more ominous.
One can’t listen to Knoxville and not wonder about the many lacunae in our knowledge of Price — her personality, her family, her memories of youth, all those things she has so decorously obscured over the years. Although she has spoken eloquently of her family, and always with deep admiration and love, she is not an artist who opens up with all the details. There is a reserve, a caution in her self-presentation. In retrospect, from the midst of our confessional age, her reticence is admirable; so too her repeated insistence in interviews that she doesn’t want to dwell on the challenges, the hard years, the struggles it took to conquer the musical world.
Anyone from my generation, and anyone younger, who learns to appreciate her astonishing artistry must make an effort to fill in those gaps. Price was born in Mississippi in 1927, when Jim Crow laws were proliferating across the South, segregating schools, hospitals, theaters and opera houses. She came from a family of modest means that scraped and struggled to provide her with an education and support her musical talent. In many ways her ascent was exceptional and even miraculous — a scholarship to Juilliard, friendship with Samuel Barber, discovery by Herbert von Karajan, a string of world triumphs, followed by a Metropolitan Opera debut. But it was dogged by the ugliness of racism, too.
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Rehearsing with Herbert von Karajan, 1960
Opera News Archives |
In 1955, when she sang Tosca on a national NBC television broadcast, several stations in the South refused to air it. In Richard Osborne’s biography of Karajan, we learn of the bigotry she faced at Salzburg in 1960, when someone threw a stone through her window. In a forthcoming history by Charles and Mirella Jona Affron, Grand Opera: The Story of the Met, we learn the darker context of her Metropolitan Opera debut. That same year, at an Atlanta performance of the Met on tour, African–American ticketholders were asked to give up their seats in the orchestra to avoid antagonizing white audience members; and in 1964, bigots in Atlanta objected to her scheduled performances as Donna Anna.
Rudolf Bing resisted those pressures, though the Met was hardly a trailblazer when it came to African–American singers. Looking back, there is an odd illusion: after Marian Anderson officially broke the color barrier at the Met in 1955, suddenly an astonishing number of incredibly gifted African–Americans were singing there, including Price, Martina Arroyo, Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett and George Shirley. But they didn’t materialize out of nowhere. And they didn’t get there on any ordinary measure of talent. They got there because they were super, exceptionally talented, far beyond the measure of what it would have taken for a white singer to earn a place on the Met’s stage.
Price’s image of her talent is likely contained in that lesson she learned at Juilliard about principal versus interest. One hears the musical effects of that lesson not just in the longevity of her voice but in its pure inexhaustibility. “I always like to feel when I’ve left a performance that I can turn around and go back and do it all over again,” she once said. Even when one hears, here or there and very rarely, a note that isn’t perfect, that sounds slightly under duress or forced a little too hard, one never senses Price flagging in the larger sense. She isn’t perfect in the dull manner of some very well-trained singers today; but one never senses that she’s reached her limit.
Two years after her Met debut, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington — where Anderson sang in 1939 after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused her permission to sing before an integrated audience at Constitution Hall. Everyone remembers the soaring rhetoric of his peroration; but the speech opened with another image, that of the promissory note, a debt owed to African–Americans by the nation’s founders, left unpaid and now little better than “a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”
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A pause in an RCA recording session
RCA Victor Records/Opera News Archives |
King’s image spoke of what was owed to African–Americans, but Price’s artistry recast the economic metaphor of being black into something radically different. She presented herself to audiences as someone who could give and give and never be depleted. She knew perfectly well what thrilled listeners — the husky basement of her voice, where she could growl like a contralto, the soaring top with the ever-so-slight vibrato that made it sound preternaturally warm — and she never skimped in supplying them with those prismatic displays of raw vocal beauty. She was a canny artist.
But in some ways, she also held back. In a late interview, she spoke of how much she loved her own voice, and how essential that was to communicate something to others. Somehow, over the course of a long and triumphant career, she managed the most difficult balancing act, projecting power and dignity but never arrogance. She knew her own worth, and she was a diva, but she was never that kind of diva. There was no false modesty, but no preening either.
I wonder if my first impressions weren’t, in fact, just as true as all the subsequent ones. Price was, and is, untouchable, in the manifold meaning of the word. She is remote; she is without peer; and she thrilled us because she could do absolutely anything while spending only the surfeit of her enormous musical riches.
PHILIP KENNICOTT, chief art critic of The Washington Post, received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
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