A Voice Like a Banner Flying

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Big Auntie sits in the parlor listening to French art songs on the phonograph. They sound, she says, "a little like the cha cha cha."

Past the veranda of the one-story. frame house runs South Fifth Avenue. It is a narrow, rutted road of yellow clay shaded by oak trees. On the other side of town, beyond Magnolia Street and the county courthouse with its marbled Confederate soldier, runs the avenue known as North Fifth. There stand the great mansions with their porticoes and colonnades and carriage houses. Big Auntie has been there-as downstairs maid and cook on the cook's night out-in the big green house set back from the street by a lawn. Although their names might suggest otherwise, North and South Fifth-one a white street, the other Negro-converge at no point in the town of Laurel, Miss. But in the person of a local girl who "went over the water to sing." they converged this winter on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House.

The voice in Big Auntie's phonograph belongs to one of the world's great singers: her niece, Leontyne Price. When Laurel-born Soprano Price. 34, made her Metropolitan debut last month, she faced, in the audience, a score of Laurel friends and relatives from both Fifth Avenues and from the sleepy streets in between. Her triumph monopolized the front page of the Laurel Leader-Call ("She reaches the pinnacle") and for a time, even crowded out the achievements of that other local Negro hero, Olympic Broad Jumper Ralph Boston. Laurel knew about Leontyne before Rudolf Bing ever heard of her, and few of Laurel's 27,000 people are likely to forget it. The night of her debut, the local Western Union operator turned cranky under the weight of well-wishing wires. "I know where to reach her," she eventually snapped to callers; "just tell me what you want to say."

Biggest Moment. What critics and audiences have wanted to say of Leontyne's Met performances is that they surpassed even the expectations raised by an already glowing European reputation. For her first Met season, Leontyne Price contracted to sing five roles: Leonora in ll Trovatore, Aida, Cio-Cio-San in Butterfly, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Liu in Turandot. Her Leonora proved to be a remarkable portrayal of a woman in whom dignity struggled with desperation and in whom grief somehow shone more movingly through a profound sense of repose. The amalgam of qualities made her fourth act aria D'amor sull'ali rosee a dramatic as well as a technical triumph. It was perhaps the most wildly applauded moment of the present Met season--a season made somewhat lackluster by several dull, slack productions but rendered memorable by what seemed like a new age of brilliant singers, most notably Birgit Nilsson, triumphant in Turandot, and Soprano Price herself.

The Butterfly she unveiled last week was, in contrast to her Leonora, a creature that lived on the surface of emotion --tentative, vulnerable but never mawkish. In the last act. when Soprano Price enacted the difficult suicide with a dignity that many a famed soprano is unable to muster, Cio-Cio-San ceased to be a quaintly pathetic figure and became what she rarely isa truly tragic one.

But Soprano Price's triumph at the Met, as it often has been elsewhere, was her Aida. Moving about the stage with feline grace, passing with a kind of visceral instinct through moods that were supplicating and menacing, aggressive and sweet, she achieved one of the great Aidas of operatic history. Sustaining all of the performances was the voice, unfurling like a bright banner from the stage and through the opera house.

With Power to Spare. "Leontyne leads with that voice," says her accompanist. David Garvey. "It is her Rock of Gibraltar." Leontyne's Gibraltar is known technically as a lyric spinto-a high soprano voice with dramatic feeling. No singer today is better capable of straddling both the lyric and the dramatic moods than she is, and none possesses a voice that is more secure throughout its considerable range-the G below middle C to the D above high C. Says she: "I never try an F in public. I sometimes do it in the shower, but there I may just be intoxicated by the soap."

She can send her soprano flooding through a house the size of the Met without straining and with the marvelously reassuring suggestion that she has power to spare; but her singing also has all the agility and the feather-lightness of a much smaller voice. Her special glory is a legato line of floating, finespun phrases. A most demanding critic passed judgment on her voice when he heard it for the first time: it gave him goose pimples, said Conductor Herbert von Karajan.

What gives a voice goosepimple potential? What makes a singer great? Obviously talent and training. Amply talented. Leontyne Price has never stinted the training, still works hard with her teacher, Florence Page Kimball, even takes phonograph records along on her tours to study other singers' versions of a role during the long hours in hotel rooms. Like many other singers, she did not really reach her peak until she passed 30, has developed remarkably in style and power during the last three or four years. Says Teacher Kimball: "It is not lessons that have done it. It's her life-that solid, secure feeling she gained from the people around her who love her and help her."

Earthy Presence. Others seeking to identify Leontyne Price's special quality also point not only to her voice but to her person. There are many superb operatic voices among comparative newcomers: Birgit Nilsson. Anna Moffo, Anita Cerquetti, Teresa Berganza, Joan Sutherland. Leonie Rysanek. What distinguishes Price from them as a performer is a kind of earthy presence-a quality that has little to do with acting. Many sopranos and actresses have been called "the essential female" but Leontyne Price convinces most of her audiences that she really fits the description. Not beautiful but with almost translucent brown skin, high cheekbones, and compelling eyes set in charcoal shadows, she has a memorable face; her figure-broad-hipped yet lithe, strong yet feminine, medium tall yet commanding--animates any costume she wears, and she can whip a train or thrust a sleeve with regal authority.

Leontyne Price is inevitably compared to opera's other great divas. Renata Tebaldi, an indifferent actress, is perhaps the closest to pure voice; if she wanted to, she could produce ravishing sounds while reading a grocery list. Eileen Farrell wields her powerful voice with a fine sense of dramatic effect, but she is handicapped by a stage presence that sometimes destroys the illusion that her voice is creating. As for Maria Callas, she triumphs through sheer intelligence, acting ability and guts over her vocal limitations; she has undeniable fire without comparable warmth. Says a colleague who has worked with them both: "Callas expresses the torture of her life through her voice. Leontyne expresses her joy."

Whipped, with Love. Much of the joy, according to Leontyne's mother Kate, derives from the fact that Kate was singing hymns in the choir of St. Paul's Methodist Church in Laurel, back in 1927, when she felt the first pangs signaling the impending birth of Mary Leontyne Violet Price--a first child after 13 years of barrenness. Her father James, an erect, dignified, sparrow--thin man. now 79, worked in the local sawmills (Laurel used to call itself the Yellow Pine Capital of the World before the woods gave out). Kate Price, an iron-willed woman with some of Leontyne's own incendiary temper, took to midwifery to bolster the family income. Working at first for a fee of $10 per baby-or sometimes for a side of bacon or a barrel of peas-Kate delivered about 900 children over the years and never, she boasts proudly, lost a mother. But she created some problems for Leontyne : "The neighbor kids would say, 'You didn't come the right way; your mamma carries babies in her black bag.' " Although Leontyne has "retired her," Kate Price delivered a child shortly before traveling to New York for the Met debut, returned promptly to Laurel because another child was on the way.

As Leontyne recalls it, she and her brother George-two years younger and now an Army captain-had the kind of childhood any kid might expect from oldfashioned. God-fearing and strict parents. If you disobeyed, "you got yourself whipped-with love, but you were torn up just the same." The color bar was as strong in Laurel as anywhere in the South, but the children were not aware of it at the time: "We were taught to judge peo ple as individuals, not on the pigment of their skin," says George. Today some Southerners use the Price success story to bolster their arguments. Says Laurel's Leader-Call Editor J. W. West: "This gal is a good example to other nigras. She wasn't hurt by attending a nigra school."

The Other Family. On South Fifth Avenue, when Leontyne was growing up, few children owned two pairs of shoes, and some did not even have one pair. At a sacrifice, James and 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 3 1/2 Leon tyne took her first lessons from Mrs. Hattie Mclnnis. the town's Negro music teacher, and if Kate Price could not raise the fee of $2 a lesson, she would do Miss Hattie's washing and ironing.

When Leontyne was five, Kate traded in the family Victrola as down payment for a piano. "When she came home from school." says Kate, "that child had one-half of a fit." On the other side of town, on North Fifth Avenue, lived the Alexander Chisholms. Elizabeth Wisner Chisholm was the daughter of a lumber baron, and Alexander Chisholm a Vermonter who met his wife while she was a music major at Smith.

He returned to Laurel with her, is now chairman of the board of the First National Bank. After school Leontyne would sometimes wander over to the large green house to visit "Big Auntie" Everlina Greet, the Chisholms' maid (before that, she had been the Wisners', served the two families for 45 years before she retired four years ago). Leontyne would play with Jean and Peggy, the two older of the three Chisholm daughters. They were, she recalls, her "other family," and she was their "chocolate sister."

Where She Came From. "Miss Elizabeth" Chisholm remembers Leontyne in those days as the girl with the "high-glee eyes" who was forever singing. She took to accompanying Leontyne at the piano, and later she occasionally had her perform at informal musicales. Between Leontyne and the Chisholms-who eventually helped send her to the Juilliard

School of Music in Manhattan-grew an attachment that both sometimes feel has been misunderstood. Says Leontyne: "Everyone finds it so amazing that two families should love each other in the middle of Mississippi which is, let's face it, a red-hot state where my ancestors were not so high on the social scale. Well, that hasn't got a cotton-pickin' thing to do with it. There wasn't anything in the world Mrs. Chisholm wouldn't have done for me. But she was my friend first and my benefactress second-whatever I turned out to be, and even if I didn't turn out to be much of anything." Says Mrs. Chisholm of Leontyne: "Don't call me her patron. I don't think I have ever 'patronized' Leontyne. I have only loved her. I'm just where she came from."

But where she came from remained in many respects a divided world. Leontyne entered the Chisholm mansion by the back door, as she does to this day. She is free to use the front door, Mrs. Chisholm explains, but it would make the help uncomfortable.

The First Leontyne. At Laurel's Oak Park High School, Leontyne seemed to specialize in everything. She was a high school cheerleader ("There would be Leontyne at half time," says Kate Price, "walking around the field on her hands") and a soloist on virtually every one of the Negro community's civic and church programs. She also appeared at funerals, until one group of mourners was so overcome by her expressive performance that she was asked to stop singing. She did but vowed angrily: "That's the last funeral I'll ever do."

At 17, "high on the hog, with my first piece of luggage and two coats," Leontyne left Laurel for the North. Impressed by her voice, an Army chaplain from nearby Camp Shelby had helped her win a scholarship to Wilberforce University, a mostly Negro school in Ohio. On her entrance application she wrote, under Plans for the Future: "I'm worried about the future because I want so much to be a success."

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 her and didn't bother any of the others."

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 Caucasian family" but to "the Omnipotent" for providing talent and "to my parents for having birthed me."

Crisis at Juilliard. Leontyne's greatest stroke of 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 people would take to a psychiatrist or a priest." Miss Kimball still coaches Leontyne. makes critical notes at her rehearsals, will travel almost anywhere-as will the Chisholms-to hear her perform.

For four years Leontyne labored at Juilliard. appearing in any student production she could get into, singing for anybody who cared to listen in the lobby of the International House where she lived, or at the customary candlelit Sunday night suppers. Says a pianist friend of the Juilliard days: "It never entered my mind that Leontyne would not make it." But Leontyne herself was far less sure. She fell in love with a Haitian ("He was no musician." says Leontyne now, "but he sure was an artist"), and when the episode ended abruptly, she began threatening suicide. One night at a Riverside Drive party during which she had been dancing in her stocking feet, she was suddenly overcome by melancholy and started out toward the Hudson. A friend calmly told her to put on her shoes first. She did, and after driving up and down the river most of the night, she shook off her gloom.

Enter a Goddess. Soon afterward, at a student performance, Soprano Price was heard by Producer Robert Breen, who was then signing a cast for a revival of Porgy and Bess. At Breen's request, Leontyne sang for Ira Gershwin/ Loves You, Porgy and Slimmer time. Before the audition, she stood despairingly with a friend on a Broadway street corner. "Nothing's going to happen," she said. "Nothing can happen." By nightfall she had the female lead.

For two years Leontyne Price sang "at least four Besses a week"-on Broadway, on the road and in Europe. She also married her Porgy, Baritone William Warfield, in Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, with one of the Chisholm daughters attending and with six members of the cast as bridesmaids. Married for 8^ years, Leontyne and Warfield are kept apart most of the time by the demands of their careers.

In Leontyne's mind, Porgy and Bess was only an interlude: she still wanted a career in grand opera, and she started on that road by giving her first serious recital at Town Hall in the fall of 1954. The critics were enthusiastic, especially the Herald Tribune's Jay Harrison, who detected "a goddess performing among us." She has spent six seasons singing on the Community Concert circuit and in 1955 broke into opera as the lead in the NBC Tosca. Casting a Negro in the role, says Leontyne composedly, "created quite a rumpus, but it was a successful rumpus." At any rate, she feels that Bess was good preparation for Tosca: "Both were strumpets, only Tosca dressed better."

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."

The Ultimate. Leontyne made her grand opera stage debut in 1957 at the San Francisco Opera in Dialogues of the Carmelites by Francis Poulenc, who had been impressed by her concert performance of his songs. Although she "enjoyed a real cold petrification," the debut was a major success. On the strength of it, she was invited to return to San Francisco that year to sing Aida in place of Antonietta Stella, bedridden with an appendectomy. She had become familiar with the role when she sang it with the Philadelphia Orchestra. A year later at Covent Garden, when Anita Cerquetti was forced to withdraw from Aida for the same reason, Leontyne again filled in. "My career," says she, "was launched on the appendectomies of Italian sopranos."

Remembering the Carnegie Hall audition, Herbert von Karajan invited her in 1958 to make her European debut with the Vienna State Opera in Aida. Since that triumphant evening, Leontyne and Von Karajan have enjoyed a kind of mutual-admiration pact. After Vienna, the road went speedily upward. In 1960 she walked through the stage door of La Scala (she had vowed never to enter as a tourist) and made her debut, again in Aida, without a single stage rehearsal. "After all," she says, "what's the problem? The Nile can only be upstage." The crowd shouted "Brava Leonessa!" Then, for the new opera house at the Salzburg Festival last summer, Von Karajan "had this big, fat, crackpot idea of my doing Donna Anna." Leontyne did it, and followed it by opening the Berlin Festival as soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic. By then the Met's Rudolf Bing had signed her, and that was "the ultimate." Says Leontyne, looking back: "It was all so fast. My mind was so wide open. It was like having growing pains before your time."

Makeup Savers. When Leontyne was departing for Juilliard, Big Auntie recalls, "Miz Chisholm called her and she say, 'Promise me you'll keep on bein' just Leontyne.' " Not many people know who "just Leontyne" 15-perhaps not even Leontyne.

To one associate, her "big tragedy is that she doesn't want to be colored." Her brother George and most of her friends disagree. "She's not battling that," says Teacher Kimball, "or she couldn't sing the way she does." Says Leontyne herself: "I am not a crusader in anything except my career." Often when she talks about her race, it is in joking fashion. The dusky Aida she refers to as her "makeup-saver role." Once a wardrobe mistress forgot and warned her about soiling her light costume with the dark Aida makeup. Leontyne pointed to her skin and said, "Honey, you'd be surprised; that won't come off."

Abroad she likes the relaxed atmosphere concerning "the matter of pigmentation," nevertheless spends most of her time with her accompanist, or secretary, or the professionals that cluster around opera houses and recording companies. She has been taken in warmly at the Met where she is known, according to a colleague, as "not typical by singer standards-she's too nice."

Havin' a Ball. But Leontyne also has a fierce professional pride and a temper to match. Told not long ago that a male singer was unable to make a rehearsal, she raged: "I don't give a hoot about him or any other singer. He's lucky to be in this with me, dear. That jerk--he can't sing because he hasn't got any vocal technique, that's why!" After such an out burst she is likely to shrug her shoulders, smile and murmur, "I don't know why I get so excited."

Occasionally she expresses her professional grievances with a gag. Once she overheard a tenor telling an admirer that his "lovely, pure, full and beautiful" voice moved Miss Price to tears. "I hate to bring this up," said Leontyne, "but it is my voice so warm, full and beautiful that moves me to tears." Of a well-known soprano who decided to get married and retire, Leontyne asked: "Retire from what?" She has a great, saving capacity for laughing at herself, too. Back home last Christmas, she made a joke of helping at table at the Chisholms when the maids were away: "I'm keepin' my hand in," she said. "The first flat C and I'll be back here."

Leontyne can sometimes play the grand diva sprinkling her conversation with Italianisms, rolling her r's across the room. After taking a college course in elementary French, Brother George recalls, she suddenly stopped spelling her name Leontine, replacing the i with the y that she still uses. Says a friend: "Sometimes she can be all mink and ermine, and the next minute she'll be plain old southern Mississippi." But the southern Mississippi usually pops out first. After her Met debut she encountered Metropolitan General Manager Rudolf Bing backstage. He asked how she was. "Mr. Bing," said Leontyne, "I'm havin' a ball." Later that night, at a party in her honor, a guest asked her to sing something. "Nobody's gonna leave this party unhappy," said Leontyne. She broke into Summertime.

A Silver Shield. Leontyne has not taken a vacation in years, rarely sees her twelve-room house in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. With a six-figure income, the only luxury she finds time for is buying dresses (in Rome) and hats and suits (in Vienna). She has also completely refurnished the Price home in Laurel, built a room to accommodate Big Auntie. She now has a considerable entourage, including a personal manager, a concert manager, an accompanist, a pressagent, a male secretary and a housekeeper, all of whom, as Teacher Kimball once put it, "would like to put a silver shield around her to protect her."

But Leontyne Price usually knows how to take care of herself, and her preparation for each performance is a calm ritual. She likes to spend the day "with myself." At 4 p.m. she has a half-hour bath, during which, "if I'm a good girl, I study the score." She has a solid meal at 5 because, with all the energy a singer needs, she can't look like a Bazaar model. "I never worry about my weight--you're going to look smaller from the audience anyway." (Leontyne Price does not look particularly small.) She carries a thermos of hot bouillon with her to the theater for steadying swigs before particularly difficult scenes that might "tensify" her. She usually arrives in her dressing room an hour and a half before the performance. "I like time," says Leontyne, "to put out my trinkets on my dressing table-my pictures of my brother and his children and of my mother and father and of Mr. von Karajan and a little mascot dachshund to make me laugh."

Just Begun. Perhaps the key to her career, says Teacher Kimball, is that "she's never defeated by things that haven't gone right." Her Thais reviews in Chicago two years ago were not good, and Miss Kimball stayed over to read them with her, warning that they were disappointing. "What do they say about my voice?" asked Leontyne. "They say you have a great voice," said Miss Kimball. "All right, then," said Leontyne. "The rest I can learn, and I will."

Her determination is undergirded by a powerful religious faith (she is the granddaughter of two Methodist ministers). She talks about "the Omnipotent" as naturally as if he were her neighbor. "I never go onstage," says Leontyne, "without saying a prayer-sometimes an extra prayer before arias like D'amor sull'ali rosee in Trovatore or O patria mia in Aida." And the debut? "I just stood there in the wings and thought: 'Dear Jesus, you got me into this, now you get me out.' "

Now, six weeks later, "about once a day I still lie back on my little couch and close my eyes, and I just relive tidbits of that ovation. That's about the highest cloud I could ever float on." But to a friend who called to congratulate her she said grimly: "You realize that my work has only just begun." Wherever the work takes her, she knows that from time to time she must go home to Laurel again: it is the place where she feels she can be "just Leontyne." After the triumphs at Salzburg and Milan, she recalls, she made a flying visit and encountered a deacon of St. Paul's Methodist Church walking up South Fifth Avenue. "Hi, Leontyne," said the deacon. "Still singin'?"

She was--and is.

*Although no Negro had ever sung a solo role there at the time. The first: Marian Anderson, who in 1955 long past her vocal prime-appeared in the minor part of the fortune teller Ulrica in Verdi's A Masked Ball. Following Anderson, three Negroes have had lead roles at the Met: Baritone Robert McFerrin, Sopranos Mattiwilda Dobbs and Gloria Davy.

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