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But Soprano Price's triumph at the Met, as it often has been elsewhere, was her Aïda. 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 Aïdas 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.