Who is Leontyne Price?

Leontyne Price, the first African American opera singer to gain international recognition, was born Feb. 10, 1927, to a working-class family in Mississippi. Price, a soprano, was a 19-time Grammy Award winner. Her Grammy Awards included 13 for operatic or song recitals, five for full operas, and a special Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, more than any other classical singer. Her first important stage performances were as Mistress Ford in a 1952 student production of Verdi’s Falstaff. Shortly thereafter, Virgil Thomson hired her for the revival of his all-black opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. After a two-week Broadway run, Saints went to Paris. Meanwhile, she had been cast as Bess in the Blevins Davis/Robert Breen revival of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and returned for the opening of the national tour at the Dallas State Fair, on June 9, 1952. The tour visited Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C, and then went on a tour of Europe, sponsored by the U.S. State Department. After stops in Vienna, Berlin, London, and Paris, the company returned to New York when Broadway’s Ziegfield Theater became available for a “surprise” run. She has won 13 Grammy Awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1965, the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement in the arts in 1980, and the First National Medal of Arts. She has appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and she performed at the White House in 1978. Price has lived alone for years in a townhouse in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

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