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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 Aïda 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 Aïda 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 Aïda. 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 Aïda, 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 Aïda she refers to as her "makeup-saver role." Once a wardrobe mistress forgot and warned her about soiling her light costume with the dark Aïda 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."