Leontyne Price

Leontyne Price in 1994

Mary Violet Leontyne Price (born February 10, 1927) is an American soprano. Born and raised in Laurel, Mississippi, she rose to international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s, and was the first African American to become a leading performer, or prima donna, at the Metropolitan Opera, and one of the most popular American classical singers of her generation.

After her farewell opera performance at the Met in 1985, a televised performance of Aida, one critic described Price's voice as "vibrant," "soaring" and "a Price beyond pearls." Time magazine called her voice "Rich, supple and shining, it was in its prime capable of effortless soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C."

A lirico spinto (Italian for "pushed lyric") soprano, she was considered especially well suited to roles in operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

After her retirement from opera, she continued to appear in recitals and orchestral concerts until 1997.

Among her many honors are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964), the Spingarn Medal (1965), the Kennedy Center Honors (1980), the National Medal of Arts (1985), numerous honorary degrees, and 19 Grammy Awards for operatic and song recitals and full operas, and a special Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, more than any other classical singer. In October 2008, she was among the recipients of the first Opera Honors by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2019, Leontyne Price was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Boston Conservatory at Berklee.

Life and career

Leontyne Price was born in Laurel, Mississippi. Her father James worked in a lumber mill and her mother Katie was a midwife who sang in the church choir. They had waited 13 years for a child, and Leontyne became the focus of intense pride and love. Given a toy piano at the age of three, she began piano lessons with a local teacher. When she was in kindergarten, her parents traded in the family phonograph as the down payment on an upright piano. At 14, she was taken on a school trip to hear Marian Anderson sing in Jackson, an experience she later said was inspirational. In her 2011 autobiography, My Life, as I See It, Dionne Warwick notes that Price is her maternal cousin.

Price in 1951

In her teen years, Leontyne accompanied the "second choir" at St. Paul's Methodist Church, sang and played for the chorus at the black high school, and earned extra money by singing for funerals and civic functions. Meanwhile, she often visited the home of Alexander and Elizabeth Chisholm, where her aunt worked as a laundress. A wealthy white family connected to the dominant lumber company in Laurel, the Chisholms encouraged Leontyne's piano-playing and singing, and sometimes hired her to entertain guests. During World War II, Leontyne began working part-time in the Chisholms' household as a maid and baby-sitter. She was allowed to play the piano and to listen to music on the radio and record player.

Aiming at first for a teaching career, Price enrolled in the music education program at the all-black Wilberforce College in Wilberforce, Ohio. (The institution's public and private arms split in her junior year and she graduated from the new, public Central State University.) Success in the glee club led to solos, and her teachers began to encourage her to pursue advanced studies in voice. At Wilberforce, Price joined Delta Sigma Theta, a sorority that would help arrange and support performances early in her career. After first hearing Leontyne sing at a master class at nearby Antioch College, the famous bass Paul Robeson put on a benefit concert for her in Dayton (at which she also sang) at the end of her senior year. The $1,000 proceeds were earmarked for her conservatory studies. However, Robeson was becoming a controversial figure for his left-wing political stands. Although she apparently accepted the money, she later denied the concert had ever taken place. After graduation, Mrs. Chisholm began accompanying Leontyne in recitals and church appearances in and near Laurel, and agreed to defray some of her future expenses. In fall 1948, Price enrolled at the Juilliard School in New York City. She auditioned and won a scholarship and was admitted to the studio of Florence Page Kimball, who would remain her teacher until Miss Kimball's death in 1973.

In fall 1950, Leontyne entered the Opera Workshop at the school and became enthusiastic about opera, singing in workshop performances of The Magic Flute and Gianni Schicchi. That summer, she enrolled in the opera program at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood and sang Ariadne in Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos (second cast). In early 1952, she sang Mistress Ford in Juilliard production of Verdi's Falstaff. It proved her big break. In the audience was Virgil Thomson, who hired her for the revival of his all-black opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. After a two-week Broadway run, Saints (and Price) went to Paris. Meanwhile, she had auditioned and been cast as Bess in the third major production of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, directed by Robert Breen, who had also hear her in Falstaff. Bereft returned from France, she sang the opening night of Porgy at the State Fair of Texas on June 9, 1952 to rave reviews. The Breen-Davis production toured Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., and then Europe (Vienna, Berlin, London and Paris), under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department.

Price from Porgy and Bess 1953

On the eve of the European tour, Price married her Porgy, the noted concert singer, bass-baritone William Warfield, at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, with many of the cast in attendance. The couple were legally separated in 1967, and divorced in 1973. They had no children.

Price planned on a recital career, following the successful models of Marian Anderson, tenor Roland Hayes, Warfield, and other black concert singers. Amid performances of Porgy, she sang the premiere of Hermit Songs, a song cycle by Samuel Barber, at the Library of Congress. She also premiered new works by Lou Harrison and John La Montaine.

However, Porgy had proved that she had the voice and the personality, and confirmed her appetite, for the operatic stage, as the Met itself recognized by inviting her to sing "Summertime" at a "Met Jamboree" fund-raiser on April 6, 1953 at the Ritz Theater on Broadway. Price was therefore the first African American to sing with the Met, if not at the Met. That distinction went to Marian Anderson, who, on January 7, 1955, sang Ulrica in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera.

Emergence

In November 1954, Price made her recital debut at New York's Town Hall with a program that featured the New York premiere of Samuel Barber's cycle Hermit Songs, with the composer at the piano. Her first recital tour followed on the Columbia Artists roster. The door to opera opened through the NBC Opera Theater, under music director Peter Herman Adler. In January 1955, she sang the title role of Puccini's Tosca, becoming the first African American in a leading role in televised opera. Price sang in three later NBC Opera broadcasts, as Pamina in The Magic Flute (1956), Madame Lidoine in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957), and Donna Anna in Don Giovanni (1960). Although the Tosca broadcast was shown without incident (her appearance had not been widely advertised), several NBC affiliates (including some north of the Mason–Dixon line) canceled the later broadcasts.

In March 1955, she auditioned at Carnegie Hall for the Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, who was touring with the Berlin Philharmonic. Impressed with her singing of "Pace, pace, mio Dio" from Verdi's La forza del destino, Karajan reportedly leapt to the stage to accompany her himself. Calling her "an artist of the future," Karajan asked her management and was given permission to direct her future European career. (She would make her European debut under his baton in 1958.) Over the next three seasons, Price crossed the U.S. in recitals with her longtime accompanist, David Garvey. She also toured India (1956) and Australia (1957), under the auspices of the U.S. State Department. On May 3, 1957, a concert performance of Aida at the May Festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was her first public performance of what became her signature role.

External audio

You may hear Leontyne Price performing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem Mass in D minor K. 626 with Herbert von Karajan conduicting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Fritz Wunderlich, Eberhhard Wachter, Hilde Rossel-Majdan, Walter Berry in 1960 Here on archive.org

Her grand opera debut occurred in San Francisco on September 20, 1957, as Madame Lidoine in the U.S. premiere of the Dialogues of the Carmelites. A few weeks later, Price sang her first staged Aida, stepping in for Italian soprano Antonietta Stella, who was suffering appendicitis. After her European debut, as Aida, at the Vienna Staatsoper on May 24, 1958, she made noted debuts at London's Royal Opera House (replacing Anita Cerquetti), and at the Arena di Verona, both as Aida. In 1958-59, she returned to Vienna to sing Aida and her first onstage Pamina; repeated her Aida at Covent Garden; gave a televised recital with Gerald Moore and sang operatic scenes by Richard Strauss on BBC Radio; and made her debut at the Salzburg Festival in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, conducted by Karajan.

That summer, she also sang Il trovatore in Verona (with tenor Franco Corelli) and made her first full operatic recording, of Il Trovatore, for RCA. After hearing one of the Verona performances that Rudolf Bing, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, invited Price and Corelli to make their Met debuts in 1960-61.

On May 21, 1960, Price made her debut at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, again as Aida, becoming the first African American to sing a leading role in Italy's greatest opera house. (In 1958, Mattiwilda Dobbs had sung Elvira, the secondary soprano role in Rossini's L'italiana in Algeri.)

Metropolitan Opera

Rudolf Bing had invited Price to sing a pair of performances as Aida in 1958, but she turned down the offer on the advice of Peter Herman Adler, director of NBC Opera, among others. In his autobiography, William Warfield quotes Adler as saying, "Leontyne is to be a great artist. When she makes her debut at the Met, she must do it as a lady, not a slave."

On January 27, 1961, Price and Corelli made a triumphant joint debut in Il trovatore. The final ovation lasted at least 35 minutes, one of the longest in Met history. (Price said her friends or family had timed it at 42 minutes, and that was the number used in her publicity.)

In his review, The New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that Price's "voice, warm and luscious, has enough volume to fill the house with ease, and she has a good technique to back up the voice itself. She even took the trills as written, and nothing in the part as Verdi wrote it gave her the least bit of trouble. She moves well and is a competent actress. But no soprano makes a career of acting. Voice is what counts, and voice is what Miss Price has."

The reviewers were less enthusiastic about Corelli, who told Bing the next morning that he would never sing with Price again. But this outburst was soon forgotten. Price and Corelli sang together often over the next dozen years, at the Met, in Vienna, and in Salzburg.

In her first season at the Met, Price sang four other roles: Aïda, Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, and Liu in Turandot. In recognition of this extraordinary run, Time magazine put her on its cover in March. That fall, she was named "Musician of the Year" by American music critics and put on the cover of "Musical America."

In September 1961, Price opened the Met season as Minnie in La fanciulla del West. A musicians' strike had threatened to abort the season, but President Kennedy sent Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to mediate a settlement. During the second Fanciulla performance, she had her first serious vocal crisis. In the middle of the second act, she grew hoarse and then lost her singing voice, shouting her lines to the end of the act. The standby, soprano Dorothy Kirsten, was called and sang the third act. The newspapers reported that Price was suffering a virus infection. After several weeks off, she returned and repeated the Fanciulla and then, after a Butterfly in December, canceled appearances and left for a several-month respite in Rome. The official word was that she had never fully recovered from the earlier virus. Price herself later said she was suffering from nervous exhaustion.

In April, she returned to the Met to give her first staged performances of Tosca, and then joined the tour that spring in Tosca, Butterfly, and two performances of Fanciulla, including the first performance with an African American in a leading role on tour in the South (Dallas).

Other African Americans had preceded Price in leading roles at the Met. However, Price was the first African American to build a star career on both sides of the Atlantic, the first to sing on the Met tour, the first to last more than five seasons, and the first to earn the Met's top fee. In 1964, according to the Met archives, Leontyne Price received $2,750 per performance, on a par with Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi. (Only Birgit Nilsson, who was unique in singing Italian and Wagnerian roles, earned the Met's highest fee, $3,000 a performance.)

Over the next five seasons, Price added seven more roles at the Met: (in chronological order) Elvira in Verdi's Ernani, Pamina in Mozart's The Magic Flute, Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte, Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Cleopatra in Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, Amelia in Un ballo in maschera, and Leonora in La forza del destino. Her voice and temperament were especially well suited to Verdi's "middle period" heroines, noble ladies with high, glowing vocal lines and postures of dignified suffering and prayerful supplication. She was also the leading exponent of the plaintive soprano part in Verdi's Requiem.

Antony and Cleopatra

The next milestone in her career was September 16, 1966, when she sang Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra by American composer Samuel Barber, a new opera commissioned to open the Met's new house at Lincoln Center. The composer had written the role especially for Price, often visiting her house in Greenwich Village to test the music, including the soaring leaps into the upper register in Cleopatra's two arias.

In the performances, Price's singing was highly praised, especially in the powerful death scene, but the opera as a whole was considered a failure by many critics. Director Franco Zeffirelli was blamed for burying the music under heavy costumes, huge scenery, scores of supernumeraries, and several camels. Bing acknowledged it was a mistake to launch nine new productions in the first season (three in the first week). Adding to the challenge, the opera house's new high-tech stage equipment and lighting had not been tested or fully mastered. (In the rehearsals for "Antony and Cleopatra," the expensive stage turntable broke down and, at the dress rehearsal, Price was trapped briefly inside a pyramid.) The pressured last week before the opening night, and excerpts of Price's singing, were chronicled by director Robert Drew for a Bell Telephone Hour TV documentary aired that fall. Price said the experience was traumatic and affected her attitude toward the Met, where she began to appear less often.

The opera was never revived at the Met. However, with the help of Gian Carlo Menotti, Barber reworked the score for successful productions at the Juilliard School and the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, where it received praise. Barber also prepared a concert suite of Cleopatra's arias for Price, which was premiered in Washington in 1968 and recorded for RCA.

Late opera career

In the late 1960s, Price cut back her operatic performances in favor of recitals and concerts. She was tired, stressed by the racial and political tensions in the country, frustrated with the number (and quality) of the new productions mounted for her by the Met. Perhaps she also felt the need to rework her vocal technique as she reached middle age. Over the next two decades, she became a mainstay in orchestral and recital series in the major American cities and large universities. In 1970, she returned to Europe for opera performances in Hamburg and London's Covent Garden, and gave recitals in Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, and the Salzburg Festival. At the latter she was a favorite, appearing in recitals in 1975, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1981, and 1984.

She continued to sing at the Met and San Francisco Opera, but limited herself to three to five performances, sometimes a year or more apart, and she undertook only three new roles after 1970. They were: Giorgetta in Puccini's Il tabarro (San Francisco only); Puccini's Manon Lescaut (San Francisco and New York); and Ariadne in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos (San Francisco and New York).

Her standing as a national figure was such that she was frequently called on as a soloist for state occasions. In January 1973, she sang "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" and "Onward, Christian Soldiers" at the state funeral of President Lyndon B. Johnson, at whose 1965 inauguration she had sung. A favorite singer of President Jimmy Carter, she was invited to sing on official visits by Pope John Paul II and at the dinner after the signing of the Camp David Peace Accords.

In October 1973, she returned to the Met to sing Madama Butterfly for the first time in a decade (and the last time in her career). In 1976, she appeared in a long-delayed new Met production of Aida, with James McCracken as Radames and Marilyn Horne as Amneris, directed by John Dexter. The following year, she renewed her partnership with Karajan in her only American performance of the soprano solo in Brahms' Requiem, with the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. In 1977 returned to Europe for her final opera performances there, in Il trovatore at the Salzburg Easter Festival and Vienna's Staatsoper, again under Karajan. The latter marked the first performances for both artists at the Staatsoper since 1964, when Karajan had quit as its director, and Price, a leading Viennese star, had refused to return without him.

In 1977, Price sang her final new role, and her first Strauss heroine, Ariadne in Ariadne auf Naxos, in San Francisco, to positive reviews. When she sang the role at the Met in 1979, she was suffering from a viral infection and canceled all but the first and last of eight scheduled performances. Reviewing her first performance, the New York Times critic John Rockwell was not complimentary.

Price, 1981

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter invited her to sing a nationally televised recital at the White House. In fall 1981, she had a late career triumph as Aida in San Francisco, when she stepped in for soprano Margaret Price on short notice. (Leontyne Price had not sung the role since 1976.) Columnist Herbert Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle reported that she had insisted on being paid $1 more than the tenor, Luciano Pavarotti. That would have made her, for the moment, the highest-paid opera singer in the world. The opera house denied the payment arrangement. In 1982, Price returned to the Met in Il Trovatore, and sang a televised concert of duets and arias with Marilyn Horne. In 1983, she hosted two televised performances of "In Performance from the White House," hosted by President and Mrs. Reagan.

Although she had expected her Met "Trovatore"s to be her (unannounced) final opera performances, Leontyne Price was persuaded to return to the Met for a run of "Forza"s in 1984 and a final series of "Aidas" in 1984-1985. Her performances of both operas were her first broadcasts in the "Live from the Met' series on PBS that had begun in 1977. Shortly before the last "Aida," on January 3, 1985, the broadcast performance, word leaked to the press that it was her farewell to opera. (She had planned to announce her decision as part of a biographical presentation at intermission—but she canceled the film.) Time Magazine described the televised "Aida" as a "vocally stunning performance... that proved she can still capture her peak form." Donal Henahan of the New York Times wrote that the "57-year-old soprano took an act or two to warm to her work, but what she delivered in the Nile Scene turned out to be well worth the wait." In 2007, PBS viewers voted her singing of the Act III aria, "O patria mia", as the No. 1 "Great Moment" in 30 years of "Live from the Met" telecasts. The performance ended with 25 minutes of applause.

In all, Price sang 201 performances with the Met, in 16 roles, in the house and on tour, including galas. (She was absent for three seasons—1970/71, 1977/78, and 1980/81—and sang only in galas in 1972/73, 1979/80, and 1982/83.)

Post-operatic career

Price in 1995

For the next dozen years, she continued to perform concerts and recitals. Her recital programs, framed by her longtime accompanist David Garvey, usually combined Handel arias, French mélodies, German Lieder, an aria or two, and a group of American art songs by Barber, Ned Rorem, and Lee Hoiby, and ended with spirituals. She liked to end a sequence of encores with "This Little Light of Mine", which she said was her mother's favorite spiritual.

With time, Price's voice became darker and heavier, but her upper register held up well and the conviction and joy in her singing always spilled over the footlights. On November 19, 1997, she gave a recital at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that was her unannounced last.

Before retiring, Price gave several master classes at Juilliard and other schools. In 1997, at the suggestion of RCA Victor, she wrote a children's book version of Aida, which became the basis for the hit Broadway musical by Elton John and Tim Rice in 2000.

Price avoided the term African American, preferring to call herself an American, even a "chauvinistic American". She summed up her philosophy thus: "If you are going to think black, think positive about it. Don't think down on it, or think it is something in your way. And this way, when you really do want to stretch out, and express how beautiful black is, everybody will hear you."

On September 30, 2001, at the age of 74, Price was asked to come out of retirement to sing in a memorial concert at Carnegie Hall for the victims of the September 11 attacks. With James Levine at the piano, she sang a favorite spiritual, "This Little Light of Mine", followed by an unaccompanied "God Bless America", ending it with a bright, easy B-flat below high C.

Recordings

Most of Leontyne Price's commercial recordings were issued by RCA Victor Red Seal and include three complete recordings of Il trovatore, two of La forza del destino, two of Aida, two of Verdi's Requiem, two of Tosca, and one each of Ernani, Un ballo in maschera, Carmen, Madama Butterfly, Cosí fan tutte, Don Giovanni (as Donna Elvira), Il tabarro and (her final complete opera recording) Ariadne auf Naxos. She also recorded a disc of highlights from Porgy and Bess, singing the music of all three female leads. It was conducted by Skitch Henderson and featured William Warfield as Porgy.

She recorded five Prima Donna albums of operatic arias generally of roles that she never performed on stage. She also recorded two albums of Richard Strauss arias, recitals of French and German art songs, two albums of Spirituals, and a crossover disc, Right as the Rain, with André Previn. Her recordings of Barber's Hermit Songs, scenes from Antony and Cleopatra, and "Knoxville: Summer of 1915", were reissued on CD as Leontyne Price Sings Barber. Her most popular operatic aria collection is her first, the self-titled Leontyne Price, sometimes referred to as the "Blue Album" because of its light blue cover. It has been reissued on CD and SACD. In 1996, for her 70th birthday, RCA Victor issued a limited-edition 11-CD boxed collection of her recordings, with an accompanying book, entitled The Essential Leontyne Price.

In addition, sunce her retirement in 1997, several archival recordings of live performances have been released on CDs. Deutsche Grammophon issued Salzburg performances of "Missa Solemnis" (1959) and Il trovatore (1962), both conducted by Karajan. In 2002, RCA released a shelved tape of her 1965 Carnegie Hall recital debut in its "Rediscovered" series. In 2005, Bridge Records brought out the complete 1953 Library of Congress recital with Barber, with the Hermit Songs, Henri Sauguet's "La Voyante", and songs by Poulenc. In August 2008, a tape of a 1952 Berlin performance of the Breen-Davis Porgy and Bess was found in the Berlin radio archives and released on CD. It offers the earliest recorded glimpse of Price's voice and style. In 2011, Sony Classics brought out on disc her Met broadcasts of Il trovatore (1961) and Tosca (1962), both with Corelli. They were followed in 2012 by anErnani (1962) with Carlo Bergonzi.

Partial discography

• A Salute to American Music (Richard Tucker Music Foundation Gala XVI, 1991)

Critical appreciation

In The Grand Tradition, a 1974 history of operatic recording, the British critic J.B. Steane writes that "one might conclude from recordings that [Price] is the best interpreter of Verdi of the century." For the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, a 1963 Price performance of Tosca at the Vienna State Opera "left me with the strongest impression I have ever gotten from opera." In his 1983 autobiography, Plácido Domingo writes, "The power and sensuousness of Leontyne's voice were phenomenal—the most beautiful Verdi soprano I have ever heard."

From left to right, NEA Chairman Dana Gioia honors the first class of National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honorees in 2008: Price, Carlisle Floyd, Richard Gaddes.

In an interview, Price once recalled that Maria Callas had told her, during a meeting with the older diva in Paris, "I hear a lot of love in your voice." The sopranos Renée Fleming, Kiri Te Kanawa, Jessye Norman, Leona Mitchell, Barbara Bonney, Sondra Radvanovsky, the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, bass-baritone José van Dam, and the countertenor David Daniels, have talked about Price as an early inspiration.

Miles Davis, in Miles: The Autobiography, wrote: "Man, I love her as an artist. I love the way she sings Tosca. I wore out her recording of that, wore out two sets. Now, I might not do Tosca, but I loved the way Leontyne did it. I used to wonder how she would have sounded if she had sung jazz. She should be an inspiration for every musician, black or white. I know she is to me."

She has also had her critics. In his book The American Opera Singer, Peter G. Davis wrote that Price had "a fabulous vocal gift that went largely unfulfilled," criticizing her reluctance to try new roles, her Tosca for its lack of a "working chest register", and her late Aidas for a "swooping" vocal line. Others criticized her lack of flexibility in coloratura, and her occasional mannerisms, including scooping or swooping up to high notes, gospel-style. Karajan took her to task for these during rehearsals for the 1977 Il trovatore, as Price herself related in an interview in Diva, by Helena Matheopoulos. In later recordings and appearances, she sang with a cleaner line.

Her acting, too, drew different responses over a long career. As Bess, she was praised for her dramatic fire and sensuality, and tapes of the early NBC Opera appearances show her an appealing presence on camera. In her early Met years, she was often praised for her dramatic as well as vocal skill.

In March 2007, on BBC Music Magazine's list of the "20 All-time Best Sopranos" based on a poll of 21 British music critics and BBC presenters, Leontyne Price was ranked fourth, after, in order, Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland, and Victoria de los Ángeles.

References

Notes

Books

• Sir Rudolf Bing, 5,000 Nights at the Opera: The Memoirs of Sir Rudolf Bing (Doubleday, 1972).
• Peter G. Davis, The American Opera Singer: The Lives and Adventures of America's Great Singers in Opera and Concert from 1825 to the Present (Anchor, 1999).
• Plácido Domingo, My First Forty Years (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).
• Peter G. Davis, The American Opera Singer (Doubleday, 1997).
• Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber, The Composer and His Music (Oxford University Press, 1992).
• Helena Matheopolous, Diva: Sopranos and Mezzo-sopranos Discuss Their Art (Northeastern University Press, 1992).
• LaBlanc, Michael L. LaBlanc, (1992). Contemporary Black biography. profiles from the international Black community. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Inc. ISBN 9781414435299.CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• Luciano Pavarotti with William Wright, Pavarotti, My Own Story (Doubleday, 1981), ISBN 978-0-385-15340-9
• Lyon, Hugh Lee (2006). Leontyne Price: Highlights of a Prima Donna. New York: Authors Choice Press.
• Stephen Rubin, The New Met (MacMillan, 1974).
• Winthrop Sargeant, Divas (Coward, McCann, Geohegan, 1973).
• J. B. Steane, The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record (Timber Press, 1993).
• Rosalyn M. Story, "And So I Sing:"African American Divas of Opera and Concert" (Amistad, 1990).
• Robert Vaughan, Herbert von Karajan (W.W. Norton & Company, 1986).
• Galina Vishneyskaya, Galina, A Russian Story (Harvest/HBJ Book, 1985).
• Ward Plowden, Martha (2002). Famous Firsts of Black Women (2nd ed.). Gretna, La.: Pelican Pub. Co. ISBN 1565541979.
• William Warfield, with Alton Miller, William Warfield: My Music and My Life (Sagamore Publishing, 1991).

Articles

• Blier, Stephen (October 1996). "Time After Time". Opera News. 61 (4).
• Jackson, Robert (July 1985). "Collard Greens and Caviar". Opera News. 48 (1).
• Myers, Eric (March 2006). "Reunion: Justino Diaz". Opera News. 70 (9).
• Perkins, David (5 October 1986). "The Garbo of Opera". News and Observer. Raleigh, North Carolina.
• "Leontyne Price, Ill, To Rest for Month". The New York Times. 23 December 1961.
• "The Nation: Where Atlanta's 'Big Mules' Relax". Time. 10 January 1977. on 1964 Don Giovanni controversy

External links

• Leontyne Price on IMDb
• Leontyne Price at the Internet Broadway Database
• Metropolitan Opera Archives Database
• Leontyne Price "Voice of the Century" Extensive fan site
• Leontyne Price Biography on Afrocentric Voices