Leontyne Price
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Mary Violet Leontyne Price (b. 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 was one of the visible, and for many symbolic, triumphs over racial prejudice by African Americans in the 1960s, and a high water mark for American classical singing.
In an extraordinary generation of singers that included Maria Callas, 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. Her soprano was remarkable for its rich, sensual, sometimes husky timbre, brilliant and controlled high notes, and smooth and expressive phrasing. Her voice ranged from A below Middle C to the E-flat above High C. (In interviews, she said she sometimes sang a high F "in the shower.")
She is also a quotable woman whose many bon mots have 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 told her she wouldn't be able to stay at the whites-only hotel with the rest of the Met 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 continued giving recitals across the U.S. long after her retirement from the opera stage. Among her many honors are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1965), the National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Honors, numerous honorary degrees, and 19 Grammy awards, including a special Lifetime Achievement Grammy 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. Leontyne was a late child and the focus of intense pride and love. When her musical talent showed itself early, her parents traded in the family phonograph for a toy piano and, when she was five, saw to it she had piano lessons. An affluent white family in Laurel, the Chisholms, for whom her aunt worked as a maid, also encouraged Leontyne 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, but 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 became a pupil of Florence Page Kimball.
Her first stage performance was as Mistress Ford in a student production of Verdi's Falstaff. The composer and critic Virgil Thomson heard her and hired her for the 1952 Broadway revival of his all-black opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. Producers Blevins Davis and Robert Breen had also seen her "Falstaff" and cast her as Bess in their 1952 revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Starting at Dallas State Fair, the production toured the U.S., creating a sensation in front of integrated audiences. Then it took off for Europe, sponsored by the U.S. State Department. The production made stops in Vienna, Berlin, and London (where it ran for two months), then returned for a Broadway run at the Ziegfield Theater, again with Price as Bess. After the U.S. tour, Price married her Porgy, the acclaimed concert and film singer William Warfield, at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. (In 1958, they were legally separated; they divorced in 1972. In his memoirs, "My Music and My Life," Warfield describes how their careers forced them apart.)
At first, Price planned for a concert and recital career, in the pattern of her idol, the contralto Marian Anderson, and other great black singers to whom the world's opera houses were closed. She and Warfield performed a few joint recitals, then decided against marketing themselves as a duo. On October 30, 1953, Price premiered Samuel Barber's Hermit Songs at the Library of Congress, with the composer at the piano. In May 1954, she and Barber performed the cycle again at an international music conference in Rome. On November 14, 1954, she made her New York recital debut at Town Hall, with Barber again accompanying in his Hermit Songs. She and Barber offered themselves as a recital team, but got few invitations.
Opera called her instead. Her success as Bess had proved she had an operatic voice and instincts. The Met itself recognized this when it invited her to sing "Summertime" at a "Met Jamboree" fundraiser on April 6, 1953, at the Ritz Theater on Broadway. (Therefore she was the first African American to sing with the Met, if not at it.) The Met's front door finally opened a crack on January 7, 1955, when Marian Anderson sang Ulrica in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. The occasion was important, but the role was small, and Ulrica is a voodoo witch described in the libretto as a Negro. Who would break the real barrier, and sing leading 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 NBC performance reveals a young soprano with a fluttery , careful English enunciation, and the easy, shining top notes that would become a hallmark of her singing. She sang in three later NBC Opera productions: The Magic Flute (1956), Dialogues of the Carmelites, and Don Giovanni (1963).
Her opera house debut came in San Francisco where, on September 20, 1957, she sang Madame Lidoine in the U.S. premiere of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites. On October 18, she stood in for an ill Antonietta Stella and sang Aida for the first time. Meanwhile, earlier that year, she had auditioned at Carnegie Hall for the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, who confessed that her singing "gave him goose pimples" and invited her to sing Salome at La Scala. When she demurred, he invited her to appear at the Vienna State Opera, where he was the incoming intendant. She made her debut as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, then sang Aida.
Over the next decade, von Karajan conducted Price in some of her greatest performances, in the opera house (Salzburg productions of Mozart's Don Giovanni and Verdi's Il Trovatore), the concert hall (Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and the Verdi Requiem), and the recording studio, where they produced complete sets of Tosca and Carmen, and a classic album of holiday music, A Christmas Offering. All are available on CD. On DVD, their close rapport is visible in an exciting 1967 Verdi Requiem from Milan's Teatro alla Scala, filmed by French director Henri Clouzot.
On July 2, 1958, Price made another acclaimed debut, as Aida, at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Two years later, on May 21, 1960, she appeared at La Scala, again as Aida, becoming the first black singer in a leading role in the high temple of Italian opera. (She had declined to perform there with the Porgy and Bess cast in February 1955, saying she was determined to "come in the front door.")
Arrival
Completing a garland of triumphant debuts, Leontyne Price arrived at the Metropolitan Opera (Met) in New York City on January 27, 1961, as Leonora in Verdi's Il Trovatore. Bing had arranged for the Italian tenor Franco Corelli to make his debut the same night, and the combination ignited a historic performance that ended with a 42-minute ovation. The next day, New York Times critic Harold Schonberg wrote of Price: "Her 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 last 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." He was not quite so complimentary about Corelli. According to Bing's memoirs, the tenor was so angry at being overshadowed that he locked himself in his hotel room the next day, and the Met's staff had to beg him to come out.
Price's Met arrival was a political as well as a musical event. The Civil Rights movement was gathering force and friends and movement supporters had traveled to New York to cheer her on. Since Marian Anderson's debut in 1955, several 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 Mattiwillda Dobbs sang Gilda (with Leonard Warren) in 1956; Geoffrey Holder performed in the Aida dance sequence that year; and in 1959, the soprano Martina Arroyo sang the offstage Celestial Voice in Don Carlo. Price, however, became the first African-American singer to sing multiple leading roles, at the Met 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 was carefully judged. After her NBC Tosca, Bing had invited her to sing a single Aida, but Peter Herman Adler, director of NBC TV opera, advised her to wait. In Warfield's memoirs, Adler is quoted as saying: "Leontyne is to be a great artist. 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 a mature singer, with more roles prepared, a huge European reputation, and an RCA recording contract. Her portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and, in her wake, many 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 performances (at the house and on tour), and 16 different roles. She introduced seven characters in her first two seasons: the Trovatore Leonora, Aida, Liu in Turandot, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, Tosca, and Minnie in La Fanciulla del West. The latter she sang on opening night of the 1961-2 season, to excellent reviews, but midway in the second performance she lost her voice and the soprano Dorothy Kirsten took over for the Third Act. The indisposition was the result, Price later said, of overwork. She had sung with the Berlin Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall between the two Met performances, and allowed herself only one day of rest. Other tensions must have taken their toll, as well. A musicians' strike had threatened to delay the season, and Price herself appealed, apparently despite Bing's skepticism, to President Kennedy to intervene. He did, appointing Arthur Goldberg to mediate the dispute. Others have suggested Minnie was just too heavy for her sweet, lyric voice. She sang Fanciulla three more times that season, once at the Met in December, and twice on tour the following spring, in Cleveland and Dallas, but never again.
In Atlanta, Fanciulla was assigned to Dorothy Kirsten--whether because Price declined, or because Bing felt the white Atlanta audience was unready to accept her, has never been reported. Price finally appeared in Atlanta on May 14, 1964, as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. That she felt under enormous pressure that night is suggested by a story told by the bass Justino Diaz, who sang the Commendatore. After the big Act I recitative and aria, "Or sai chi l’onore," Price received a standing ovation. "It seemed to be unending," Diaz recalled many years later 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.'" In his memoirs, Bing writes of the satisfaction he felt in taking Price into a whites-only restaurant during that visit. He does not explain why he didn't do so earlier.
In the next three seasons, 1962-65, Price added four new roles at the Met: Pamina in Mozart's Magic Flute, Fiordiligi in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and Elvira in Verdi's Ernani. Her success in Ernani, on the heels of her Aida and Trovatore, proved that she was especially well suited to Verdi's heroines, with their high lines, passionate outbursts, and restrained poses of suffering-in-love. She soon added two more: Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera (1966) and Leonora in La Forza del Destino (1967). These five middle-period Verdi roles, plus the Verdi Requiem, became her core repertoire from the late 60s into the early 80s, and in these she had few rivals. A few contemporary sopranos who sang Verdi and Puccini with comparable distinction were Martina Arroyo, Montserrat Caballe, Leyla Gencer, and the Mexican soprano Gilda Cruz-Romo. Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi and Zinka Milanov would have been tougher competition (and are on recordings), but they had all more or less left the stage by the mid-60s.
These Verdi roles were also Price's calling cards at the international opera houses. She sang the Forza Leonora in St. Petersburg with La Scala in 1964; Aida in Rome (1966), Paris (1968), and Hamburg (1971); and the Trovatore Leonora in Buenos Aires (1969).
'Antony and Cleopatra'
Another career milestone came on September 16, 1966, when Price sang in the world premiere of Antony and Cleopatra by American composer Samuel Barber, commissioned to open the Met's new house at Lincoln Center. Barber and Price had been friends and frequent collaborators for more than a decade. Following the success of Hermit Songs, Barber had asked her to sing the soprano solo in the U.S. premiere of his Prayers of Kierkegaard in Boston in 1959. (A decade later, she introduced a new song cycle, Despite and Still, in a Philharmonic Hall recital.) In his new opera, Barber said he tailored "every vowel" of Cleopatra's music to Price's voice, and often carried fresh pages of music to her Greenwich Village home.
It was not a success. Price's singing was praised, particularly in the final suicide scene, but she was at the mercy of the director Franco Zeffirelli (who was also the librettist, adapting Shakespeare's play). In the view of many, Zeffirelli buried Barber's music under a multitude of extras and animals, floating steel clouds, and a rotating Sphinx. One reviewer said Price's heavy costumes made her look like Sitting Bull. Then, the expensive turntable broke down, and on opening night Price found herself trapped inside a pyramid. Some critics found Barber's score lacking in high points--there was no love duet, for example--and Barber revised it in 1973 with the help of his former companion Gian Carlo Menotti, and the revised version played to better reviews in Charleston, S.C., and in Chicago. In 2004, it was given in concert format at Carnegie Hall, with Carol Vaness as Cleopatra.
Late Career
In the 1970s, Price cut back on opera performances in favor of recitals and concerts. Bing said she cited a fear of overexposure; friends say she was frustrated with Bing's offers of the same old roles in old productions. At the same time, keeping Aida, which she came to call "the Ethiopian bit," up to her early standards must have been difficult as she made the inevitable adjustments of vocal middle age. With recitals, she could be in control, and tailor her programs to what suited her vocally.
After 1970, she added only three new operatic roles: Giorgietta in Puccini's Il Tabarro (in San Francisco), Manon Lescaut in Puccini's opera, and Ariadne in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos (these last in San Francisco and the Met). In 1973, she sang Madama Butterfly again at the Met and was given a half-hour ovation after her harrowing death-scene. In 1976, she sang Aida again at the Met, in a new production with Marilyn Horne singing her first Amneris. In spring 1977, she sang the soprano solo in the Brahms Requiem in Carnegie Hall with the Berlin Philharmonic and von Karajan. That summer and fall she sang Il Trovatore at the Salzburg Festival and in Vienna, in a nostalgic return under von Karajan (who was himself returning after a long absence to Vienna). In 1978, she gave a televised recital from the White House. That year, she sang Strauss' Ariadne to acclaim in San Francisco, but was suffering from a virus when she sang it at the Met the next year; she canceled one Met performance, and the Times reviewer didn't have much good to say about another.
She scored a late-career triumph in San Francisco in 1981, when she stepped in for an ailing colleague (the Welsh soprano Margaret Price) to sing Aida. This was one of the few occasions when she sang with Luciano Pavarotti, the Radames. A newspaper reported that she had insisted on being paid $1 more than the tenor, which would have made her, for a moment anyway, the highest paid opera singer in the world. The opera house denied this.
After visiting her early roles in San Francisco (Carmelites, Il Trovatore, and more Aidas), Price bade farewell to opera on January 3, 1985, in a nationally telecast Met Aida. After taking "an act or two to warm up," as Times critic Donal Henahan put it, she produced "pearls beyond price," notably the Act III aria, "O patria mia," which received a five-minute ovation. Speaking about her retirement, Price said, "I prefer to leave standing up, like a well-mannered guest at a party."
Sunset
For the next dozen years, she concentrated on concerts and recitals. Her recital programs, chosen with her accompanist David Garvey, were varied and substantive, combining French mélodies, German Lieder, Spirituals, an or two, and a group of American art songs, many of them written for her by 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 same venue in 1939. In addition to stops in the big American cities and major university concert series, Price and Garvey gave recitals at the Salzburg Festival in 1974, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981, and 1984.
In later years, Price's voice became heavier and more effortful, but the upper register held up remarkably well, and the conviction and joy in her singing spilled over the footlights and earned 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."
She continues to teach master classes at Juilliard and other schools. In 1997, Price 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 of 2001, Price, at 74, came out of retirement to sing in Carnegie Hall at a memorial concert 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 "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 included three complete sets of Trovatore, two of Forza, two of Aïda, two of the Verdi Requiem, two of Tosca, and Ernani, Ballo, Carmen, Madama Butterfly, Cosí Fan Tutte, Don Giovanni, Il Tabarro and (her final complete opera) Ariadne auf Naxos. Highlights from "Porgy and Bess" were recorded with Warfield, under Skitch Henderson. In addition, Leontyne Price recorded many recital albums, including five "Prima Donna" operatic recitals, two albums of Strauss arias, collections of French and German art songs, two albums of Spirituals, and a crossover disc, Right as Rain, with Andre Previn. Her recordings of Samuel Barber's music, including arias from Antony and Cleopatra, the Hermit Songs, and Knoxville: Summer of 1915, are available on "Leontyne Price Sings Barber." Many believe her first opera recital, made in 1960, titled "Leontyne Price" and known as the "blue album," captures her vocal personality at its early best. (It has been reissued several times on CD.)
After a dispute over the casting of an Otello with Placido Domingo in 1979--Price had been announced as the Desdemona, but Renata Scotto got the job--Price ended her exclusive relationship with RCA and several late recordings appeared on London-Decca and EMI/Angel, including a late album of Verdi arias (re-issued on CD in Decca's "Classic Recitals"). In 1996, to honor her 70th birthday, RCA brought out a deluxe 12-CD collection of excerpts from her opera and recital recordings, with an accompanying book, titled "The Essential Leontyne Price." Copies are hard to find; one was recently for sale on Amazon.com for $419.
Historical recordings continue to appear. In 2002, RCA-BMG unearthed a tape of her 1965 Carnegie Hall recital debut and issued it on CD in its "Rediscovered" series. In 2005, Bridge Records released the complete 1954 Library of Congress recital with Barber, including the "Hermit Songs" (already issued on RCA), Henri Sauguet's song-cycle "La Voyante," and songs by Poulenc.
Recordings that got away: A complete Messiah with Warfield, Price, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, under Eugene Ormandy, was discussed after their successful 1959 Philadelphia performances, but Columbia (which had the orchestra's contract) and RCA (which had Price's) could not come to terms, and the recording was made with the same forces and soprano Eileen Farrell. In 1974, RCA planned to record Don Giovanni with Price, Sherrill Milnes, and Montserrat Caballé (as Donna Elvira), but the deal fell through. Donna Anna was Price's only major role that was never recorded commercially. (She recorded the two arias in the "Prima Donna" series, and early radio "Don Giovanni" broadcasts from Salzburg and Vienna, both under von Karajan, can be found on CD.) Regrettably, RCA never recorded an album of the American art songs she championed in recitals, including Barber's "Despite and Still" and Lee Hoiby's "Songs for Leontyne."
Reputation
In his 1974 history of vocal recordings, "The Great Tradition," the British critic J.B. Steane comments that "one might conclude from recordings that [Price] is the best interpreter of Verdi of the century." In her autobiography, the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya wrote that hearing Price's sing Tosca at the Vienna State Opera in 1962 "left me with the strongest impression I have ever gotten from opera." In his autobiography, Placido Domingo writes, "The power and sensuousness of Leontyne's voice were phenomenal - the most beautiful Verdi soprano I have ever heard." From Luciano Pavarotti's autobiography, "Only a very few opera stars can fill a concert hall - Joan Sutherland, Leontyne Price, Marilyn Horne, and Beverly Sills - maybe a few more could sell out halls in New York - but that's about it." The sopranos Kiri Te Kanawa, Leona Mitchell, Barbara Bonney, Sondra Radvanovsky, the bass-baritone Jose Van Dam, and the countertenor David Daniels, talk about Price as an inspiration.
At her best, Leontyne Price sang with a uniquely beautiful legato, the ability to carry the tone smoothly from note to note on the breath. She had a wide dynamic range, carrying the richness of her full voice into her mezza voce and pianissimo singing (which in other singers often is an alien, colorless sound). And she had a personal and vivid way with rhythm and register shifts, soaring up to a glowing high note with delicious ease, on the leading edge of the beat (the B-flat in the aria "Pace, pace" is an example), or plunging to dark depths, as in Carmen's dismissive phrase: "Mais pas aujourd'hui! C'est cerTAIN." By mid-career, her style had become stiffer and cooler, with outbreaks of misplaced emphasis, including scooping or sliding up to high notes and other "gospel" effects. Von Karajan himself took her to task for her mannerisms in rehearsals for the 1977 "Il Trovatore", as Price herself relates in an interview in "Diva: Sopranos and Mezzo-sopranos Discuss Their Art," by Helena Matheopoulos. Her later recordings show that she took his advice seriously, and rethought her style.
In addition, while she always seems to have found her upper register easy, her lower register was, as she put it in a late interview, "constant work." Early on, she pushed the awkward lower register break in a way that made a guttural sound that was considered expressive by some, ugly by others; later, she smoothed this over, but her low-middle notes became breathy and hollow. Still, as TV broadcasts from the 1980s (viewable on YouTube.com) prove, she often succeeded in minimizing her weaknesses and recapturing the bright tone and pure style of her youth. A warm, human quality was always present in her singing, and the careful pacing of her career, while criticized by some at the time as stingy, proved wise in the long run.
Opinions of her acting depend on what point in her career is being discussed. Tapes of a 1958 CBC Aida (available on a VAI DVD) show that, early on, she moved freely and expressively on stage. In later performances, she became a stiff, stand-and-deliver singer-actress. She herself once said, "I don't expect to win any Academy Awards." A DVD of a 1982 "Live from the Met" TV broadcast of "Forza"--the only film of Leontyne Price in a complete opera--shows her carrying herself with compelling dignity and poise.
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 toward performing: "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."
"I am a vocal impressionist. My voice has thousands of colors. And I tap one at will to express what I'm doing. It's instinctive."
"Whenever I am onstage, it is during, I am happy to say, my ovations, the love that I receive from the audience, it is in that moment that I am trying to promise my public, 'I will be better next time.'"
"You must learn to say no when something is not right for you."
"As an American [singer], you may never be an haute couture lied specialist, but we're broader than that. We are a mixture of the best of everything, and as an American it is my duty to present our music--especially in my own country, where American song is not too well appreciated. When a young singer comes backstage and says 'I liked such and such a thing," I grab them and say, 'Learn it!'"
"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."
"Once you get on stage, everything is right. 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).
Placido Domingo, "My First Forty Years" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).
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 Univerity 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 Great Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record." (Timber Press, 1993).
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.), Oct. 5, 1986
External links
- http://66.187.153.86/archives/frame.htm Metropolitan Opera Archives Database.
- [Leontyne Price "Voice of the Century"] Extensive fan site.
- [Profile on Afrovoices.com]
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