Word: scala
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...says, was the realization that she would need a manager and that such a responsibility should not fall to a stranger: "At least I am honest and sincere." Magrina claims responsibility for having persuaded De los Angeles to leave Spain for the more lucra tive climate of La Scala and the Met. Today he handles all contract negotiations, has long since become inured to being addressed by his wife's name. Says he: "Victoria sings, but later she is the classic Spanish woman in her home. In private life, she is my wife, not I the consort of Victoria...
...travels about Europe, figures Soprano Leontyne Price, she must have walked several dozen times through Milan's Piazza della Scala, past the ornate brown-brick theater with the triple-arched main entrance. She never went in. "I swore," says she, "that I would not enter even as a tourist until I sang there." Last week she entered, singing: at 33 she was making her La Scala debut in Aïda, and the demanding audience recognized almost at once that she would...
Handling her big, liquid soprano voice with faultless accuracy, Singer Price achieved an Aïda that was at once feline and tender, sweet and aggressive. She won bravas after her opening trio with Radames and Amneris (a place in the opera that has not drawn applause at La Scala in years), got many more ovations as she ranged effortlessly from finespun pianissimos to brilliantly ringing fortes. "Brava, Leonessa!" cried someone in the audience, while a second voice corrected: "She is more like a panther than a lioness." Said one critic: "Our great Verdi would have found her the ideal...
...Leontyne Price, the climb to La Scala's stage seemed remarkably easy. She started her musical career playing the piano at funerals at home in Laurel, Miss., where her father was a sawmill laborer and her mother a midwife who "delivered more babies than necessary so I could have piano lessons." At Central State College in Ohio, Leontyne discovered she had a voice, went on to Juilliard, where Critic-Composer Virgil Thomson heard her and asked her to appear in his opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. From there she joined the touring revival of Porgy and Bess...
...Tosca ("I was the first black Tosca that big audience had seen"), later made her European grand opera debut in Aïda at the Vienna Staatsoper, guided by Conductor Herbert von Karajan. Since then Leontyne has had an uninterrupted string of European successes, particularly in Italy. After La Scala, Soprano Price has one more giant step ahead of her in the U.S.: next season she will sing yet another Verdian role-Leonora in Il Trovatore-in her debut at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera...