Music: What Price Glory, Leontyne!

The toughest decision a famous performer has to make is knowing when to quit. The invigorating roar of the crowd and the trappings of celebrity are hard enough to relinquish voluntarily; it is even more difficult to walk away from something one has spent a lifetime attaining. Retirement is particularly agonizing for singers. Pianists and conductors have been known to perform into their 80s or even their 90s, but opera stars know that biology is destiny. Some time in their 50s or early 60s, the powerful, flexible and ultimately mysterious instrument that has been the source of their artistry frays, cracks and disappears.

Birgit Nilsson knew at 63 that her time had come; in 1982 the noblest of modern Brunnhildes put away her breastplate and shield, assured of a permanent place in every Wagnerian’s vocal Valhalla. Beverly Sills, the ebullient American queen of bel canto, tossed off her last Donizettian roulade in 1980. Last week another of that generation’s dominant divas appeared on an opera stage for the last time: Leontyne Price ended a glittering 32-year career with a vocally stunning performance of Verdi’s Aida at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera that proved she can still capture her peak form. At the opera’s end, cheering fans shouted their approval for nearly half an hour.

“On Feb. 10 I will be 58 years old, and it is thrilling to be asked why I am retiring, rather than why not,” says Price, who has lost none of the stately, imperious glamour that marks the born diva. “There is nothing in the world more embarrassing, more pathetic than the artist who can no longer give his best. I did something right,” she adds. “I took care of the most extraordinary thing I have: my voice.”

And so she has. Rich, supple and shining, it was in its prime capable of effortlessly soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C. From her 1957 debut in San Francisco, as Madame Lidoine in Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, Price was recognized as a major talent. The following year, Conductor Herbert von Karajan cast her as Aida in Vienna; when she sang the Ethiopian princess at La Scala in 1960, one Italian critic exclaimed: “Our great Verdi would have found her the ideal Aida.” Her Met debut came in 1961, as Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore; that performance provoked a prolonged ovation for only the fifth black artist to sing a major role in the house since Marian Anderson broke the color line six years earlier. In such dramatic soprano roles as Tosca, Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Verdi’s other Leonora, in La Forza del Destino, Price established herself as a prima donna assoluta, and in her greatest roles–Aida and the two Leonoras–there was no one better.

Onstage, Price had none of the fiery, histrionic talent that, say, Maria Callas brought to her art. Instead, she unleashed a voice elemental in its passionate intensity. When Price sang the Forza Leonora’s Pace, pace, mio Dio, it was the heartrending plea of a desperate woman begging God for surcease; when she cried O Scarpia, avanti a Dio! at the end of Tosca, it was a chilling curse delivered at the gates of hell. And when she sang Aida’s anguished O patria mia, as she did last week, it was a radiant invocation of pathos.

As with all great performers, there is no false modesty about Price. A confessed “egomaniac,” she has a firm sense of her own worth–and her place in opera. It is, after all, somewhat improbable that the daughter of a sawmill worker and a midwife who both sang in a church choir in segregated Laurel, Miss., could rise to the top of a profession historically dominated not only by whites but by Europeans. Yet as Price wrote on her entrance application to a predominantly black college in Wilberforce, Ohio, “I’m worried about the future because I want so much to be a success.” In 1949 she won a scholarship to Manhattan’s Juilliard School, where her teacher, Florence Page Kimball, economically taught her to “sing on your vocal interest, not on the principal.” In 1952 she was discovered by Composer Virgil Thomson, who cast her in his opera Four Saints in Three Acts. That led to her first popular triumph, as Bess in a revival of Porgy and Bess. A great career was launched.

Price is especially proud of the part she has played in opening the world’s stages to younger black singers like Sopranos Leona Mitchell and Kathleen Battle. “I am here, and you will know that I am the best and will hear me,” says Price, summarizing her philosophy. “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.” She took particular satisfaction from singing with Bass Simon Estes in her farewell Aida: “It makes me feel just wonderful to have this black god standing behind me.”

Price has been a shrewd judge of her limitations as well as her talents. With few exceptions, she sang only parts suited to her voice and physique. She never sang those consumptive lost souls Mimi in La Boheme and Violetta in La Traviata, accurately observing, “I’m just too healthy for coughing spells.” Although she toyed with the idea of tackling the Marschallin in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, she rightly realized that “Verdi is definitely my friend.”

In the ’70s Price cut back appearances at the Met, angry over the lack of new productions staged for her. Instead, she concentrated on her “first love,” recitals. She is booked on recital tours through 1987, allowing her to indulge a longstanding predilection both for spirituals and for songs by such contemporary composers as Samuel Barber, John La Montaine, Ned Rorem, Margaret Bonds and Dominick Argento. Price also is scheduled to give a series of master classes in San Francisco in 1986. When dealing with sopranos, retirement is a term best understood loosely: five days after her operatic farewell, Price rushes off to St. Paul to help inaugurate the Ordway Music Theater with a recital. “The legacy of the great ones you are trying to live up to takes time, energy, concentration, your life,” she says. “I met the challenges. Why not have some fun now?”