Word: debutants
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first time at the Metropolitan Opera last week. Soprano Leontyne Price brought to Anna a vitality that she rarely had before, gave as fine a reading of the role as present-day operagoers are likely to hear and see. As in her previous appearances in this triumphant debut season-Leonora in Il Trovatore, Aïda, Cio-Cio-San in Butterfly-Soprano Price was setting new standards by which to judge some of opera's classic roles...
...Scoring a triumph in his first television opera-and in a role that he had infrequently sung before-was about par for Tozzi. He made his Met debut only six years ago; since then, he has thrown his big bronze voice into 27 different Met roles-including King Phillip in Don Carlo, Fiesco in Simon Boccanegra, Padre Guardiano in La Forza del Destino-and in the process has become one of the world's great bassos...
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...
...stopped spelling her name Leontine, replacing the i with the y that she still uses. Says a friend: "Sometimes she can be all mink and ermine, and the next minute she'll be plain old southern Mississippi." But the southern Mississippi usually pops out first. After her Met debut she encountered Metropolitan General Manager Rudolf Bing backstage. He asked how she was. "Mr. Bing," said Leontyne, "I'm havin' a ball." Later that night, at a party in her honor, a guest asked her to sing something. "Nobody's gonna leave this party unhappy," said Leontyne...
...talks about "the Omnipotent" as naturally as if he were her neighbor. "I never go onstage," says Leontyne, "without saying a prayer-sometimes an extra prayer before arias like D'amor sull'ali rosee in Trovatore or O patria mia in Aïda." And the debut? "I just stood there in the wings and thought: 'Dear Jesus, you got me into this...