Here we are again. February 2021 for another Black History Month. Last year I decided for the first time to honor Black musicians of times past during this month of February. The goals during this month change from what Weekly Music Commentary normally seeks to accomplish. Where most posts work to help older music fans understand young musicians of today, this month we hope the younger fans learn to appreciate the accomplishments of historic figures.
This week I chose to feature the great opera singer Leontyne Price. Now, I am sure there are some out there who are not familiar with Leontyne Price. Some of us might find that hard to believe. However, as years go by even historical figures are forgotten a little more. Helping me understand this point a little more was the fact that my daughter and granddaughter had never heard of Leontyne Price. Was I upset? Hurt? Not at all. I realize what has happened as years passed. I also realize that Ms. Price was a classical musician. Even though she was a black woman, more young people know well Martin Luther King, George Washington Carver, and Harriet Tubman than an opera singer. It simply is not their choice of music. That’s true of so many young and older music fans today.
Nevertheless, Leontyne Price did impact the world of music. More than that, she impacted the world as a whole. My only hope is that many young people of our day will come to an appreciation of her musical talent. May you all read this post and learn about one of our national treasures, the great Leontyne Price.
Leontyne Price was born in Laurel, Mississippi. Her father James worked in a lumber mill and her mother Katherine (née Baker) was a midwife who sang in the church choir. They had waited 13 years for a child, and Leontyne became the focus of intense pride and love. Given a toy piano at the age of three, she began piano lessons with a local teacher, Mrs. H.V. McInnis, at age five. When she was in kindergarten, her parents traded in the family phonograph as the down payment on an upright piano.
At 14, she was taken on a school trip to hear Marian Anderson sing a recital in Jackson, an experience she later said was inspirational. “The minute she came on stage, I knew I wanted to walk like that, look like that, and if possible, sound something near that,” she told an interviewer in 2008.
Aiming for a teaching career, Price enrolled at the all-black Wilberforce College in Wilberforce, Ohio. In her freshman year, Price joined Delta Sigma Theta, a sorority that later helped arrange and support several of her first recitals in major cities. Her success in the glee club led to frequent solos in the chapel (including her first performance of “Vissi d’arte,” in English). She also participated in master classes, including one with the famous bass Paul Robeson at Antioch College. In 1947, she won third place in a six-state vocal competition that resulted in a performance in the National Negro Music Festival in Chicago.
In the summer of 1947, the publicly funded School of Music and Education was separated from Wilberforce University and became Central State University. Central State President Charles Wesley often took Leontyne along as a soloist to alumni and civic gatherings to promote the newly independent college, and encouraged her to consider advanced studies in voice. After her graduation in 1948, Paul Robeson gave a benefit concert for her future training in Dayton, Ohio. She also sang on the program.
Longtime family friends the Chisholms now stepped in as her professional champions. In the summers of 1948 and 1949, Mrs. Chisholm and Leontyne gave recitals in Laurel, Greenville and Meridian. The Chisholms also agreed to defray some of Leontyne’s expenses at the Juilliard School, starting in fall 1948, when she won a scholarship and was admitted to the studio of Florence Page Kimball, her principal voice teacher.
In her second year, she heard Ljuba Welitsch sing Salome from the standing-room section at the Met and became fascinated by opera. In fall 1950, Leontyne joined Juilliard’s Opera Workshop and sang small roles in workshop performances of Mozart’s Magic Flute (First Lady) and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi (Aunt Nella). In the summer of 1951, she enrolled in the opera program at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood and sang Ariadne in Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos.
At this point I must explain that the curriculum of a music major in college is quite demanding. However, for a voice major aspiring to sing opera, the class load is extremely heavy. There was a young woman who was a fellow student in several of my classes. I got a look at her list of classes. They included foreign language studies in Italian and German, on top of all the other required music theory and literature classes.It helps you understand the type of extensive studies ahead for Leontyne Price.
In early 1952, she sang her breakout performance as Mistress Ford in a Juilliard production of Verdi’s Falstaff. Virgil Thomson heard a performance and cast her in a revival of his all-black opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. After two weeks on Broadway, the production of Saints went to Paris. Meanwhile, Leontyne had been signed to sing Bess in a new production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, directed by Robert Breen.
I must thank my parents for exposing me to an array of music and musicians. I’m also happy that I had the opportunity of hearing and seeing Leontyne Price perform. Reviewing her televised farewell opera performance at the Met in 1985, as Aida, one critic described Price’s voice as “vibrant,” “soaring” and “a Price beyond pearls.” Time magazine called her voice “Rich, supple and shining, it was in its prime capable of effortless soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C.” Once I really started to appreciate music as a musician, I found her voice like no other. Yes, the word I used in the title describes it best; timeless. It means I still have not heard a voice like hers in all the years since my first exposure to Leontyne Price.
Among her many honors and awards are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964), the Spingarn Medal (1965), the Kennedy Center Honors (1980), the National Medal of Arts (1985), the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1986), numerous honorary degrees, and 19 Grammy Awards for operatic and song recitals and full operas, and a Lifetime Achievement Award, more than any other classical singer. In October 2008, she was among the first recipients of the Opera Honors by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2019, Leontyne Price was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
There have been so many great singers who have followed Leontyne Price into the world of opera. Even though there may be a lot of young people who have never heard of Leontyne Price, there are many who certainly can identify her by voice alone.
After her retirement from opera, she continued to appear in recitals and orchestral concerts until 1997. On September 30, 2001, at the age of 74, Price was asked to come out of retirement to sing in a memorial concert at Carnegie Hall for the victims of the September 11 attacks. With James Levine at the piano, she sang a favorite spiritual, “This Little Light of Mine”, followed by an unaccompanied “God Bless America”, ending it with a bright, easy B-flat below high C.
In 2017, the age of 90, she appeared in Susan Froemke’s The Opera House, a documentary about the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center in 1966.