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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 Thaïs 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 Aïda." 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.