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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, Aïda, 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.