Leontyne Price

Mary Violet Leontine Price was born on February 10, 1927, in Laurel, Mississippi, where she grew up during the era of racial segregation and Jim Crow enforcement. Her father, James Anthony Price, worked in the timber industry and as a part-time carpenter, while her mother, Katherine Viola Price, was a licensed practical nurse and midwife. Price has one sibling, her brother George, born in 1929, who reached the rank of brigadier general in the United States Army and died in 2024 at age 95. Singer Dionne Warwick has identified herself as a cousin of Price on the maternal side.

Price pursued music studies at the College of Education and Industrial Arts in Wilberforce, Ohio, an institution that had been a department within Wilberforce University at the start of her enrollment but had separated into its own institution, the State College of Education and Industrial Arts at Wilberforce, by the time she graduated with a degree in music education in June 1948. That institution is now known as Central State University. She then trained at the Juilliard School from 1948 to 1952, studying as a soprano under Florence Kimball, with whom she maintained a close working relationship until Kimball's death in 1977.

Her first significant professional engagement came in 1952 with Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, one of her two verified Broadway credits, which she performed both on Broadway and in Paris at a music festival organized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. During her time in Paris she continued her studies at the Fontainebleau School. Later in 1952 she took on the role of Bess in the third revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, her second Broadway credit, remaining with the production through the end of 1954. The run included performances across the United States, a Broadway engagement, and two European tours. Shortly before the first European leg of that tour in 1952, Price married her co-star William Warfield, the bass-baritone who portrayed Porgy; the two later divorced in 1973.

The visibility gained from Porgy and Bess opened further opportunities on the concert and recital stage. In 1953 Price performed the world premiere of Samuel Barber's Hermit Songs at the Library of Congress, with Barber himself as her accompanist, beginning a long professional association with the composer. She and Barber repeated the piece at her New York recital debut at Town Hall in 1954 and at the International Society for Contemporary Music's Twentieth Century Music Conference in Rome that same year. Hermit Songs also served as the material for her first professional recording, made for Columbia Masterworks in 1955. Works she performed frequently in concert settings included Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 and Verdi's Requiem.

In 1955 Price became the first African American to star in a televised opera when she portrayed the title role in Puccini's Tosca with the NBC Opera Theatre, a performance widely regarded as a significant moment in breaking the color barrier for Black opera singers. That success led to her first contract with an American opera company, the San Francisco Opera, where she debuted in 1957 as Madame Lidoine in the United States premiere, sung in English, of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites. Through her manager André Mertens, Price developed a working relationship with conductor Herbert von Karajan that brought her to the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, among other international venues. During the 1958–1959 season she earned international recognition for her performances as Aida in Vienna, Verona, and London, and she repeated that success at La Scala in 1960.

Price made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1961 as Leonora in Verdi's Il trovatore, becoming the first Black singer to sustain a long-term relationship with the company. She performed there for two decades in numerous roles. On September 16, 1966, she starred in the world premiere of Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, the work chosen to inaugurate the newly built Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. Her farewell opera performance at the Met came in 1985, again in Aida, a role with which she had been particularly identified throughout her career.

Among the operatic roles for which Price was noted are the title roles in Verdi's Aida and Puccini's Tosca, the Leonoras of Verdi's Il trovatore and La forza del destino, Amelia in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, Cleopatra in Handel's Giulio Cesare, and Poppea in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea. Critical assessments of her voice have varied, with writers designating her variously as a lyric soprano, a dramatic soprano, or a spinto soprano, the last of which has also been adopted in academic discussions of vocal pedagogy as a prime example of that voice type. Price herself described her voice as that of a lyric soprano. Her regular performance venues included the Vienna State Opera, the Royal Opera House, the San Francisco Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and La Scala.

After retiring from opera, Price continued to give recitals and appear in orchestral concerts until 1998. She came out of retirement in 2001 to perform at a memorial concert at Carnegie Hall for victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Her honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded in 1964, and 13 Grammy Awards.