Word: da
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Biggest Moment. What critics and audiences have wanted to say of Leontyne's Met performances is that they surpassed even the expectations raised by an already glowing European reputation. For her first Met season, Leontyne Price contracted to sing five roles: Leonora in ll Trovatore, Aïda, Cio-Cio-San in Butterfly, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Liu in Turandot. Her Leonora proved to be a remarkable portrayal of a woman in whom dignity struggled with desperation and in whom grief somehow shone more movingly through a profound sense of repose. The amalgam of qualities made her fourth...
...Soprano Price's triumph at the Met, as it often has been elsewhere, was her Aïda. Moving about the stage with feline grace, passing with a kind of visceral instinct through moods that were supplicating and menacing, aggressive and sweet, she achieved one of the great Aïdas of operatic history. Sustaining all of the performances was the voice, unfurling like a bright banner from the stage and through the opera house...
...Carmelites by Francis Poulenc, who had been impressed by her concert performance of his songs. Although she "enjoyed a real cold petrification," the debut was a major success. On the strength of it, she was invited to return to San Francisco that year to sing Aïda in place of Antonietta Stella, bedridden with an appendectomy. She had become familiar with the role when she sang it with the Philadelphia Orchestra. A year later at Covent Garden, when Anita Cerquetti was forced to withdraw from Aïda for the same reason, Leontyne again filled in. "My career," says...
Remembering the Carnegie Hall audition, Herbert von Karajan invited her in 1958 to make her European debut with the Vienna State Opera in Aïda. Since that triumphant evening, Leontyne and Von Karajan have enjoyed a kind of mutual-admiration pact. After Vienna, the road went speedily upward. In 1960 she walked through the stage door of La Scala (she had vowed never to enter as a tourist) and made her debut, again in Aïda, without a single stage rehearsal. "After all," she says, "what's the problem? The Nile can only be upstage." The crowd...
...singers sang two arias at the Met last week and suddenly made clear that, vocally, opera is in the midst of a new golden age. Soprano Leontyne Price, in Aïda, sang the famous O patria mia with such velvety beauty, such abundance of power, that she overshadowed most other recent Aïdas. Later in the same week, Birgit Nilsson sang Turandot's climactic scene in a way that will be remembered for years as the fulfillment of the opera's own description of its heroine: "Fire and ice." If two such performances can happen within...