The toughest decision a famous performer has to make is knowing when to quit. The invigorating roar of the crowd and the trappings of celebrity are hard enough to relinquish voluntarily; it is even more difficult to walk away from something one has spent a lifetime attaining. Retirement is particularly agonizing for singers. Pianists and conductors have been known to perform into their 80s or even their 90s, but opera stars know that biology is destiny. Some time in their 50s or early 60s, the powerful, flexible and ultimately mysterious instrument that has been the source of their artistry frays, cracks and disappears.
Birgit Nilsson knew at 63 that her time had come; in 1982 the noblest of modern Brunnhildes put away her breastplate and shield, assured of a permanent place in every Wagnerian's vocal Valhalla. Beverly Sills, the ebullient American queen of bel canto, tossed off her last Donizettian roulade in 1980. Last week another of that generation's dominant divas appeared on an opera stage for the last time: Leontyne Price ended a glittering 32-year career with a vocally stunning performance of Verdi's Aida at New York City's Metropolitan Opera that proved she can still capture her peak form. At the opera's end, cheering fans shouted their approval for nearly half an hour.
"On Feb. 10 I will be 58 years old, and it is thrilling to be asked why I am retiring, rather than why not," says Price, who has lost none of the stately, imperious glamour that marks the born diva. "There is nothing in the world more embarrassing, more pathetic than the artist who can no longer give his best. I did something right," she adds. "I took care of the most extraordinary thing I have: my voice."
And so she has. Rich, supple and shining, it was in its prime capable of effortlessly soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C. From her 1957 debut in San Francisco, as Madame Lidoine in Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, Price was recognized as a major talent. The following year, Conductor Herbert von Karajan cast her as Aida in Vienna; when she sang the Ethiopian princess at La Scala in 1960, one Italian critic exclaimed: "Our great Verdi would have found her the ideal Aida." Her Met debut came in 1961, as Leonora in Verdi's Il Trovatore; that performance provoked a prolonged ovation for only the fifth black artist to sing a major role in the house since Marian Anderson broke the color line six years earlier. In such dramatic soprano roles as Tosca, Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni and Verdi's other Leonora, in La Forza del Destino, Price established herself as a prima donna assoluta, and in her greatest roles--Aida and the two Leonoras--there was no one better.
Onstage, Price had none of the fiery, histrionic talent that, say, Maria Callas brought to her art. Instead, she unleashed a voice elemental in its passionate intensity. When Price sang the Forza Leonora's Pace, pace, mio Dio, it was the heartrending plea of a desperate woman begging God for surcease; when she cried O Scarpia, avanti a Dio! at the end of Tosca, it was a chilling curse delivered at the gates of hell. And when she sang Aida's anguished O patria mia, as she did last week, it was a radiant invocation of pathos.