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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."