A. Kori Hill
Leontyne Price was born in 1927 in Laurel, Mississippi. Her mother, Kate Baker Price, was a soprano in the church choir, so Leontyne was surrounded by music frequently. She started piano lessons at the age of five, but soon her voice began to take up her time. When she headed off to college, she was ready to study to be a music teacher, which was a common career path for Black women in classical music.
But while studying at the College of Educational and Industrial Arts in Wilberforce, Ohio (now known as Central State University), she was encouraged to shift her focus to performance. She graduated in 1948 and headed to Juilliard, where she had received a full scholarship.
In 1952, she joined the cast of Four Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thomson. Not long after, Leontyne took on the role of Bess in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. This production took her overseas to Europe and Russia. She also married her co-star, fellow opera singer William Warfield, who played Porgy, though they would divorce in 1973.
In 1955, Leontyne appeared on TV as the titular Tosca in a production of the Giuseppe Puccini opera; and the next year she was in NBC’s production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute. In 1957, Leontyne performed in an opera house for the first time, playing Madam Lidoine in Dialogues of the Carmelites at the San Francisco Opera House.
Leontyne performed in a lot of opera productions in the 1960s, traveling all over the world. One of her most significant performances was her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1961. Her performance as Leonora from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore garnered a 42-minute ovation, the longest ever at the Met! Another was her performance as Cleopatra in Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra to celebrate the Met’s move to Lincoln Center, which opened in 1966.
Leontyne also gave recitals, where she sang a mix of arias, art songs, and concert spirituals. One of those pieces is Florence Price’s concert spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord.” Even though they have the same last name, Florence and Leontyne aren’t related, which Leontyne makes sure to mention here!
For more than 40 years, Leontyne brought her startling artistry to concert halls and opera houses; sometimes even TV stations! As part of the generation of vocalists after Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes, Leontyne was able to perform a wider range of roles while also helping to desegregate opera. Since her retirement in 1997, she has remained a role model for opera singers, vocalists, and folks who are fiercely dedicated to their art.
