13. Leontyne PriceIl Trovatore
I was introduced to Leontyne Price when I was about 16. When I was when I was young, I was listening to music from all over the world. I was listening to West African drumming, some music that was coming out of China, I was listening to things coming out of India.
I listen to a lot of things, and what happened was that around the 1960s or so Leontyne Price hit the big time with the Metropolitan Opera. Suddenly, there was an album of hers. I don’t know where it came from but there she was. I remember staring at this album, down in the area where my parents had their music to listen to, or to boogie to, or whatever you wanted to do it. I remember staring at this album and thinking, look that’s a Black woman singing opera at the Metropolitan. I listened to her voice, just outrageously glorious. I thought, okay, because at that time I already knew that I was going to be a singer. I also knew that I was going to study classical music, because I started doing that at 15. Even though at that point I hadn’t really defined the fact that I wasn’t crazy about opera, here was someone who was doing something that had something to do with what I knew I wanted to do, which was to be a classical singer, and to be a Black classical singer of European music.
She was, in a way, like a role model. Maybe not a role model, but she was an inspiration. Looking at her and listening to her was like going, okay, you can break the colour barrier around anything if you’re brilliant enough. I didn’t really know her story, and I read up about her and I thought, wow, look at her determination. She had an unusual voice. She was able to sing in the contralto range and sound like a contralto and then sing way up and hit high Cs and sound like a soprano.
