Left: Portrait of Leontyne Price by Carl Van Vechten, 1951. Library of Congress.Center: 1948 photograph of Leontyne Price (seated bottom left) rehearsing at State College of Education and Industrial Arts. From The Afro-American. (Public Domain) Right: Leontyne Price by Carl Van Vechten, 1953. Library of Congress.
During her long and storied career as a singer of opera and popular music, Marian Anderson performed before European royalty and packed houses around the world, but there was one audience she especially strove to reach: other Black Americans.
It was during a 1936 performance in Jackson, Mississippi, which Anderson gave despite the insult of a segregated audience, that she inspired someone who would expand on her legacy, bringing even more Black excellence to opera. In that audience was a little girl on her way to becoming the diva, Leontyne Price.
Born and raised in Laurel, Mississippi, Price was a talented pianist and singer as a child, a skill inherited from her mother, a singer in the church choir, and her father, who played the tuba. In college, Price studied with the goal of becoming a music teacher, but people in her life told her to aim higher—to at least think about a performance career. She got into Julliard, and from there it was to the stars. Paul Robeson heard her as a student and contributed to her scholarship fund, and in her last year of music school, she landed her first major operatic role. By 1955, she had been chosen to sing the title role in a nationally televised production of Puccini’s Tosca with the NBC Opera Theater. Tosca is a difficult and impressive role, in part because the character is herself an acclaimed opera singer: it’s a soprano playing a soprano, diva as diva.
Price’s performance as Tosca launched her career, though the triumph was marred by the refusal of some TV affiliates to air a production with a Black star. As all Black performers must, Price had to navigate questions of race, complicated by the nature of opera. With staples of the art form taking place in Japan (Madame Butterfly), China (Turandot), Egypt (Aida), and generally anywhere composers thought of setting an exciting story with “exotic” trappings, cross-racial casting is a frequent reality, if not always a comfortable one. Roles that require or suggest a Black singer exist: Bess of Porgy and Bess is Black, and Dido of Dido and Aeneas and the titular character Aida are both African.
Price, whose career spanned integration in the United States, received plaudits for her portrayals of Bess and Aida, also performing as Cleopatra, a role written especially for her, in Samuel Barber’s admittedly unloved Antony and Cleopatra. (On the cover of the album of Aida, she sports a chic and unapologetic Afro.)
Still, she insisted on debuting at the Metropolitan Opera in a non-“Black” role, the doomed Aragonese noblewoman Leonora in Il Trovatore, and she refused roles she thought “unsuitable” for a Black performer, such as Desdemona in Otello, whose fate turns on her interracial marriage to a Black man. (Price also declined an offer to sing the sexually berserk title role in Richard Strauss’s Salome—a well-placed “no” being, of course, the mark of a true star.) Price also both hired and dated other Black people in the opera world, working with Black managers throughout her career and marrying William Warfield, a bass-baritone who sang Porgy to her Bess. Life imperfectly imitated art: Price and Warfield divorced amicably, with none of the drama that befell them in their onstage pairing.
Through it all, Price rose to become one of the Met’s—and the opera world’s—biggest draws and most consistent stars: she was bold enough to do it, she had star quality, and she was very, very good. It's hard to describe a voice, of course. Different people describe Price’s instrument as dark, light, lustrous, big, delicate, with “regal ferocity,” and as “truly, truly, truly great singing”—this last compliment from fellow Black soprano Jessye Norman. All agree that Price was special: she had the famous, elusive “it,” and anyone who heard her knew it. She had staying power, too: Price performed publicly until the late ‘90s and gave interviews into her ninetieth year (and is alive at ninety-nine years old at this writing.)
Price became such an icon, especially but by no means exclusively to other aspiring Black opera singers, that she inspired the following generation’s best-known Black diva. Jessye Norman told an NPR interviewer that, when she was in middle school, her brother played her a recording of Price singing, which decades later she described as being “like a silver cloud.” Norman would grow to become an artist of Price’s caliber: elegant, versatile, and highly in demand. Price repaid her idol, too: in 1982, three years before retiring from full opera performances but not from recitals, she dedicated a Washington, DC performance to her onetime inspiration, Marian Anderson.
In a New York Times interview that same year, Price mused about singing the role of the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, a role of an aging beauty that requires maturity of voice and, particularly, interpretation. With its meditation on aging and the passage of time, the role can easily be a swan song. Despite her well-regarded performance in another Strauss tragicomedy, Ariadne auf Naxos, she never picked up the Marschallin: a loss to opera fans, but an understandable refusal to fade away, from a woman who fought to shine.
