Skylark & Golden Calves

The soprano was the daughter of a Negro carpenter from Laurel, Miss. The tenor was the son of a naval engineer from Ancona, Italy. Together on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera last week, Leontyne Price, 30, and Franco Corelli, 36, provided the most exciting debut night of the Met season. Their joint assignment: Leonora and Manrico in Verdi's Il Trovatore.

Warm Sound. Although Leontyne Price was familiar to Manhattan audiences as a concert and disk performer, she stepped on the operatic stage wrapped mainly in a glittering European reputation. Regally got up in golden headdress and pearl-spattered green gown, she floated onto a moonlit stage in the second scene of Act I and filled the house with warm and lustrous sound in her beautiful aria Tacea la notte. With a fine economy of gesture and movement throughout the long evening, she acted a passionate Leonora.

But it was the voice that made her performance worth the Price of admission; big, easy and beautifully controlled, it was as opulent in the upper as the lower registers, and it negotiated the distance between them with liquid ease. It never strained. Her muted trills alone were enough to justify the Italian critic who was reminded of "a skylark under bewitchment." When she completed the Act IV aria, D'amor sull'ali rosee, she received the kind of ovation that at the Met signifies unconditional surrender.

For Soprano Price, the Met was the climax of a career that began with the female lead in Porgy and Bess. A Juilliard alumna, she turned from musical comedy to grand opera in an NBC-TV production of Tosca, was soon making guest appearances with the San Francisco opera. But it was in Europe that her career really caught fire. She made her European debut in Aida in 1958, at the Vienna Staatsoper under Herbert von Karajan, has since sung in most of Europe's leading houses, including La Scala. This year at the Met she will also appear in Aida, Butterfly, Turandot and Don Giovanni. On hand to see her debut last week were many friends and neighbors from Mississippi, who remember Leontyne as the little girl who used to play the piano at local funerals. Among the Mississippi visitors: the Chisholms of Laurel, for whom Leontyne's aunt worked as a maid, and who sent her to music school.

Pinza Appeal. As for Tenor Corelli, he came onstage dressed in the velvet tunic and tights that display his most famous asset: the legs that have earned him the Milan nickname of "Golden Calves" ("I just love Franco," says Leontyne Price. "He has such gorgeous legs"). Moreover, the golden calves support a 6 ft. 2 in., 180-lb. frame and a classically handsome head that qualify Corelli as the best-looking hunk of tenor now singing.* In his Met debut he demonstrated that he also has a voice. Somewhat tight at the beginning of the evening, it loosened up and reached explosive power as the acts rolled on. If Corelli proved to be a limited actor of the smite-the-brow school, he also promised to put some of the old Pinza-appeal back into opera.

* He also has a sizable reputation as an amateur swordsman: last year he leaped into a box at the Naples San Carlo Opera House during a performance of Il Trovatore to attack a heckling spectator. Two years earlier, at the Rome Opera, he crossed swords with Basso Boris Christoff, who, he claimed, was upstaging him, wounded Christoff in the finger and was slapped with a damage suit.

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