Word: sing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Kate Price always saw that Leontyne had a pair for school as well as "patent leathers for Sunday." Says Leontyne: "Mamma never wanted us to go barefoot like the other kids; she wanted us to amount to something." Leontyne's first memory of music is hearing her mother sing in "a lovely lyric soprano voice" as she hung out the clothes in the long, level Price backyard. Leon tyne had a doll piano when she was three, and. recalls Kate. "That child run me crazy giving me concerts." At 3½ Leon tyne took her first lessons from...
Because she wanted to help her Brother George through college, she signed up for a teacher's training course (he later went through South Carolina State on a full athletic scholarship). But she kept on singing-in the glee club, the choir, the dormitory shower. Even as a freshman she had what a friend remembers as "a star quality." Once she was stopped by hazing upperclassmen and ordered to sing: "Well, she just sang-the song was Because-and when she stopped, everyone just stood there. Her voice took them so much by surprise they stopped hazing...
Leontyne finally abandoned her teaching plans in her senior year and set her sights on Juilliard and the Met.* At a concert at Antioch College Paul Robeson heard her, decided that she was marvelous, and agreed to sing at a benefit to help her musical education: the concert raised $1,000. At that point Elizabeth Chisholm went to James Price and asked permission to help Leontyne too. Says Leontyne: "I love her more for that-for asking-than for any check she ever gave me." Leontyne Price fiercely insists on distributing credit for her success-not just to "the wonderful...
...luck at Juilliard was being turned over for vocal coaching to Florence Page Kimball, herself a former concert singer. The Leontyne who came to her was a "gawky, very simple child-just another student to me." Miss Kimball realized that Leontyne was more than another student after hearing her sing Mistress Ford in a Juilliard production of Falstaff. Officially. Miss Kimball was her voice teacher; unofficially, she counseled her on how to dress and carry herself, how to handle the social perplexities of a Northern city. Says a Juilliard friend: "Lee used to go to Miss Kimball the way other...
That same year she laid the foundation for her European career. A manager friend of hers had asked her to sing an audition at Carnegie Hall, without saying who was to hear her. As she started to sing, she noticed a "slim, good-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair eating a club sandwich." Midway through the audition, the slim man abandoned his sandwich, excitedly pushed the accompanist aside and rushed Leontyne through Pace, pace mio Dio! from La Forza del Destino. "I then learned," says she, "that it was Herbert von Karajan...