Patrick Bade
Leontyne Price, Shirley Verrett, Grace Bumbry and Martina Arroyo: Afro-American Divas

Patrick Bade | Leontyne Price, Shirley Verrett, Grace Bumbry and Martina Arroyo Afro-American Divas | 03.06.24

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

- We’ve heard how the great contralto Marian Anderson opened the doors of the Met in 1955 to younger Afro-American singers. And today I’m looking at four very, very fine singers who walked through that door into the Met. Leontyne Price who’s the first, top left, Grace Bumbry, top right, Martina Arroyo, bottom left, and Shirley Verrett, bottom right. So Leontyne Price was, yes, all these singers, I should say, yes, they all had very successful careers at the Met. And it was Rudolf Bing who took on all four of them. But it wasn’t all plain sailing. Each of them had their fair share of rejections and difficulties because of the colour of their skin before they eventually achieved international success and success at the Met. So the first of these was Leontyne Price and she was born in 1927 at a town called Laurel in Mississippi, on the Mississippi. Her father was a carpenter, her mother was a midwife so a very modest background.

But one thing all four of these singers have in common, it’s really struck me while I’ve been reading up about all these Afro-American artists, composers, and so on, is the importance of religion in their background. And for all four of these singers singing in church choirs, three of them Protestant, one of them Catholic. And when she was nine, she was taken to a concert given by Marian Anderson and that inspired her and decided her to become a singer herself. When she was 21, she attended a masterclass given by Paul Robeson, and he was impressed by the incredible quality of her voice. It really is one of the great voices of the 20th century. She had no money, so it was Robeson who arranged a benefit concert to raise money to send her to the Julliard School to study. And there she graduated with highest honours. And after that, and I suppose this was in a way, a relatively easy way for her into the business of opera, she joined a touring company that was presenting “Porgy and Bess.”

So she sang Bass, in fact she married her Porgy, very fine baritone, William Warfield. And that company travelled around America and it also travelled around Europe. Many Black singers have a rather ambivalent attitude towards “Porgy and Bess.” I think it was a very heroic endeavour of Gershwin back in the 1930s. But inevitably it has in the way it presents Black people, it perpetuates certain stereotypes that we might not be totally comfortable with today. So the operatic role that became her calling card was Aida. And of course, Aida, she is Nubian, so she is actually a Black character. And so previously the sopranos and I don’t think anybody does it today, but if you see photographs of Rosa Ponselle or Elizabeth Rethberg, they actually sang the role in blackface. Now Rudolf Bing was very, very determined to introduce Afro-American singers to the Met, but he wanted to do it very cautiously.

And he initially would only bring on Black singers in roles where the colour of their skin was in a way appropriate to the roles. So Marian Anderson played the character of Ulrica who is, she’s an outsider, she’s other, she’s a sort of a gypsy character, if one can use that word anymore. And Robert McFerrin, the first man, Black man to sing at the Met, he sang the role of Amonasro who is Aida’s father, so also Nubian. So in a way you could say that Leontyne Price was a natural for the role because of her appearance, but she was also completely a natural for the role vocally. It’s a very, very difficult role to sing and even very great singers have sometimes, Rosa Ponselle was absolutely terrified of the role of Aida, only sang it a couple of times in her career, particularly because of the climax of the so-called Nile aria that I’m going to play you now with Leontyne Price. Now for Leontyne, this role fitted her like a glove and she had absolutely no trouble with the climax of this aria. Beautiful floated top C, the climax is the aria. Very, very often sopranos struggle to get that note and it comes out more as a scream than a beautiful floated top note but with Leontyne, it really is perfection.

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Now, she sang that role with enormous success the first time in 1957 in San Francisco and then the following year, 1958, she went to Vienna and she sang it again under Herbert von Karajan, who actually became one of her biggest promoters and used her many times and made recordings with her. Odd really, when you think about it, this man who’d been such an ardent Nazi, didn’t seem to have a problem working with a Black singer. And then she sang it in Verona with Franco Corelli. And that was where Rudolf Bing heard her and he was so impressed with both. We’re talking 1960, and he invited both of them to make their debuts at the Met in the 1961 to 1962 season. She was quite keen not to make another debut as Aida. I suppose she must have felt in a way that although she loved singing it, and as I said, it fitted her like a glove, she didn’t want to to become kind of stereotyped as a singer who singer just sings Black roles.

So in fact, she made her debut at the Met in 1961 in the role of Leonora, who’s a Spanish noblewoman in the opera “Il Trovatore.” And I would say these two roles, Aida and Leonora really were her war horses. She must have sung them countless times around the world. In fact, the only time I ever heard Leontyne Price live, that was at Covent Garden in London, and that would’ve been in the 1970s and she sang this role. And I was sitting next to an American woman in the audience who was very excited about seeing Leontyne Price. And to tell you the truth, in the first couple of acts, I wasn’t really that impressed. I thought, “Well, what is the fuss about?” Maybe she just sang it too often. But my goodness, when she came to the last act and when she sang the aria I’m going to play to you, it was like the heavens had opened. I’d never heard such incredibly beautiful singing so I really got what she was about in that moment.

So this has become actually one of my very favourite arias. And every night I have a habit of going onto YouTube to look at a few things before I go to bed. And in that uncanny way, because YouTube knows what you like, and every single day I get presented with another version of this aria. So more often than not, I hear this aria before I go to bed every night. And in my own collection, I must have 30 or 40 versions. And this is certainly in the top half dozen versions that I know. It’s a very difficult aria once again. Again, the soprano has, there are these big arches of melody in the second half and the soprano has to know how to shade them and do it in an interesting and imaginative way. And the other difficulty is that it’s bristling with trills all the way through. And you know by now, if you’ve listened to all my lectures, how keen I am on trills and Leontyne Price has very good ones as you will hear.

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Well, as you can imagine, she had an absolutely tumultuous success that completely outshone Franco Corelli on that occasion. He had a real hissy fit according to Rudolf Bing. Threatened to never sing with her again but luckily he didn’t follow through on that and they sang together regularly at the Met. She then became the first Black singer to star in the prestigious opening night of the season at the Met and she was soon earning literally top dollar. She was earning the same amount as Renata Tebaldi, Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland, which was $2,750 a performance, a lot of money in those days. There was only one singer who actually earned more than that and that was Birgit Nilsson and she was of course, a famously tough cookie in her negotiations with opera managements. So a role that was coveted by all four of the singers that I’m playing you tonight was that of Selika in Meyerbeer’s opera, “L'Africaine.” Three of them recorded it complete.

I don’t think Leontyne, I don’t think there’s a complete recording of it with her, but there is a very lovely recording of an aria which I’m about to play you which also shows her flexibility in her coloratura skills. It’s a strange opera, Meyerbeer. As you see the title is “L'Africaine,” but he can’t, he and his librettists don’t seem to have been able to make up their mind whether the heroine is actually African or South American and the costumes of the original production in 1865 reflect that confusion. On the right hand side is actually a drawing that was made for the character of Nelusko in the 1865 premier in Paris. And I can’t help boasting to you about this, this drawing belongs to me. I found it for 20 euros in the Paris flea market. It’s really a drawing of enormous historical interest and importance. You can see it’s signed and dated 1865. And it was a cost, it was in that performance, the character of Nelusko was sung by the very famous baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, today mainly known as the first important collector of impressionist paintings. So it’s one of those things in my Paris flat where I have to really decide what to do with it, ‘cause it really ought to be in a French national collection. But here is Leontyne in Selika’s aria from “L'Africaine.”

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She also received the great honour of singing in the opening night of the new Metropolitan Opera House at the Lincoln Centre in 1966. And for that occasion, Samuel Barber was commissioned to write his opera, “Antony and Cleopatra,” with a role that was completely tailored to Leontyne Price’s voice. Her singing was, you see the photograph of her here in the role of Cleopatra, her singing was praised and admired, but the opera itself was perhaps unjustly a flop. But another opera composer for whom she felt a strong affinity, you could say her great, great strength were the middle period Verdi heroines, Aida, Leonora, Amelia in “Un Ballo in Maschera” and the other Leonora in “La Forza Del Destino.” But she was also a very good Strauss singer, Richard Strauss. And the creamy quality of her voice and her comfort in very high lying vocal lines, her ease made her ideal for these roles. And here she is in a rarely performed opera of Strauss, “The Egyptian Helen,” this is Helen’s awakening scene.

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There aren’t many singers who could make that sound as easy as that. It normally sounds a bit like a screaming match with the orchestra. So this is Grace Bumbry also in “Aida,” but singing the role of Amneris, who’s of course not a Black role, she’s an Egyptian princess. Later on, Brumby started off her career as a mezzo and she later somewhat controversially pushed her voice upwards and became a soprano. And she’s still a fine singer, but I think she was greater as a mezzo than she was as a soprano. And in an interview she was asked which of the two roles she preferred. And she said, well, actually it was a lot more fun and a lot more satisfying for her to sing Amneris than it was Aida. Aida is a slightly boring character. Amneris is a much more gutsy character. And talking of interviews, for those of you who have good German, there is on YouTube you can find this, a fascinating interview with her on a German operatic talk show called “Da Capo.” It was the opera director August Everding. He introduced many great singers of the past and the present. This is sort of 1970s and eighties. And I was really impressed by Grace Bumbry. Her German is fantastic. I mean, it’s accented.

You know, she’s not German, but it’s completely fluent. And she’s very, very articulate and interesting. She was born in St. Louis and again, quite a humble background, though moderately, no, comfortably off. Her father was a freight handler on the railroads. Her mother was a teacher. Again, there was a very religious background. And once again, she was inspired to become a singer by hearing the voice of Marian Anderson. And she won a talent contest and the prize of the contest was a scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music. But when she arrived there, she was not admitted, she was refused because of the colour of her skin. But the person who really came to the rescue of her was the great German soprano Lotte Lehmann, you see her here. And Lotte Lehmann paid for her studies and taught her. She gave her a scholarship and she taught her for three and a half years and really became the great mentor of the early part of her career. And in that interview, Grace Bumbry says that she regarded Lotte Lehmann as a second mother.

She says in the interview, “My mother gave birth to me physically, but I was reborn through the love of Lotte Lehmann.” So like all these singers, really, she had to prove herself in Europe before the Met would take her on. And she actually made her debut in the role of Eboli in “Don Carlos” in Paris in 1963. Yes, that’s right. And she then sang it at Covent Garden. And this role, again, really became her calling card. And she finally made her debut at the Met in 1965. But the role that really brought her to international tension was that of Venus in Wagner’s “Tannhauser.” And this was at the Bayreuth Festival of 1962. And here you can see a curtain call. On the left is the lovely Spanish Catalan soprano, Victoria de los Angeles, Wolfgang Windgassen as Tannhauser. In the middle is Wieland Wagner, and he was the one who made the extremely controversial decision to choose a Black American singer. Bayreuth was in, of course, an absolute centre of nationalism, being a big, big centre of Nazism.

Wieland Wagner himself was almost like a son to, he was the favourite amongst sort of Wagner clan of Adolf Hitler, and obviously a big Nazi when he was young. So once again, it’s rather strange to find an ex-Nazi taking on a Black singer. She talks a lot about this in her interview. She’s questioned about it by August Everding. It was a massive, massive controversy. There were many sort of old Wagnerians at Bayreuth who were absolutely horrified that a Black American singer should grace the stage of Bayreuth. And it was headlined not just in Germany, but actually around the world and she was dubbed the Black Venus of Bayreuth. Here she is again in the role of Venus and luckily we have a very good sound live recording of one of those performances at Bayreuth in 1962. And here you can, she is really terrific in the Venus scene, you can hear her going real full pelt as she’s haranguing Tannhauser in this scene.

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You can hear she has a terrifically free top to the voice and why she might be tempted to go soprano. She’s a very intelligent performer with a strong affinity for German music. In fact, she didn’t sing that much at the Met. She probably sang a lot more in Europe and she was based in Switzerland. And my second excerpt with Grace Bumbry is from a concert she gave of German Lieder in Salzburg. And this is the Brahms song, “Wie Melodien.”

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Now this is Shirley Verrett, and she was born in New Orleans in 1931. Again, a very religious family, this time Catholic rather than Protestant. And I think it’s interesting the role that religion plays, as I said. I think very often it’s the case with oppressed peoples, that they tend to embrace religion and religion can support them. And you see that, of course it’s true of the history of the Jews. And I’d say it’s also very true in Ireland, where the Irish people clung very desperately to the Catholic church in the face of British oppression in the past. The only past focus is she was supported financially by Richard Rodgers of Rodgers and Hammerstein. And she also encountered racial prejudice. She was much admired by Leopold Stokowski. And he hired her to sing in a concert in Houston where he was the chief conductor at the time and they refused to let her appear. And it was one of the reasons that he stated reasons that he gave up on Houston and left the town 'cause he said he was not willing to accept that kind of racial prejudice. So once again, she had to come to Europe really to prove herself. And she sang in initially Cologne, then in Russia at the Bolshoi. And finally in 1968, she got to the Met in the role of Carmen. And it’s a very bright voice, a very flexible voice with excellent coratora as you will hear in the page’s song from Macbeth’s “La Luce Langue.”

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No I can’t resist playing you an excerpt from a live recording of Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda” that was given at the Florence May Festival very early in her career. And she’s singing the role of Queen Elizabeth I of England. And of course, the opera is based on the Schiller play, “Mary Stewart.” And he invented this scene that actually never happened of an encounter between Queen Elizabeth of England and Mary Queen of Scots. And it’s one of those scenes that Italian operas love, where two females are sort of pitted against one another in a cat fight. And you wonder at the end of this scene when they went off stage, if Shirley Verrett and the Turkish soprano singing Mary Queen of Scots, what they actually said to one another, if they kissed and made up or if it had actually really gone too far in this scene.

And I love this also for the reaction of the audience. It starts off with Mary Queen of Scots sung by Leyla Gencer, turning on Queen Elizabeth and calling her vile bastard, vile bastard. And that she does it with such vehemence that in the middle of the music, the Italian audience go absolutely crazy and they break in with applause. And then of course Verrett as Queen Elizabeth, she has to turn on Mary Queen of Scots and she calls the guards and she again sings with, both of them sing with terrific vehemence in this scene. Though I have to say, I think Leyla Gencer wins out at the end with an incredible top note that would raise the dead and never seems to end. And of course, the audience go absolutely crazy once again.

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Course, that’s what opera is all about, isn’t it? Drama, lots and lots of lashings of unhealthy emotion, wonderful way to let off steam. So the last singer that I’m going to talk about is Martina Arroyo, who’s born in 1937 in New York. In 1958 when she was just 21, she won the Met Auditions of the Air and that got her into the Met straight away, but only in very small roles and she could see she wasn’t going anywhere so she came to Europe and she established herself in Europe and she had her big breakthrough once again as Aida. And this was in Zurich in 1963. And she went around Europe singing Aida in different places. And she arrived at the Met back again in 1965 and really spent the rest of her career there until 1978. Like Leontyne Price, really her best roles were the middle period Verdi roles, but I suppose she was always a little bit in the shadow of Leontyne Price and there’s a story of her arriving one day at the Met and the doorman at the Met greeting her as Ms. Price.

And she very good naturedly just said, “No honey, it’s not Ms. Price, I’m the other one.” But it certainly was a lovely voice at the beginning of her career as you will hear in a minute. And I’m going to play you another famously difficult moment, which is the “Libera Me” from the Verdi Requiem. The climax of this, it’s not even a C it’s a B, it’s a high B or even a high B flat, I’m not sure. But it’s the approach to it that is very, very difficult. And there were a couple of live recordings with the wonderful Yugoslavian soprano Zinka Milanov where she really comes unstuck or you can hear the voice beginning to tremble with nervousness and even, this is unkind to repeat this, but when I heard it with Renee Fleming, she came royally unstuck in this moment. But this is of course a commercial recording with Leontyne Price which demonstrates the beauty of her voice and the ease with which she makes this very difficult, slow ascent to the top B.

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Q&A and Comments

And certainly if you ever get a chance to hear her in a radio interview, she is absolutely hilarious. I think she could have had a career as a standup comedian, a very funny, very warm-hearted, delightful woman. Yes, silken, it is, isn’t? The way that Leontyne treats the Aida aria. And this is somebody who’s present at Ms. Price’s first performance as an understudy in “Aida” in the 1950s. Now where would that have been? It certainly wasn’t at the Met. Maybe that was in San Francisco. A fabulous voice for Strauss, as you say. Actually, I’ll tell you a singer who’s wonderful in Strauss, she’s not really one of my favourite singers really usually, and that is Montserrat Caballe. But actually her voice also has a very creamy quality at the top and that’s what you want for Strauss.

Yes, she’s still alive. She’s in her nineties. De los Angeles was not Jewish. She was very, very Catholic Catalan. But she was also controversial because the very few non-German singers were at Bayreuth up to that time and it was a huge, huge fuss for instance, when Germaine Lubin who was French, sang at Bayreuth in the late 1930s. Thank you very much, Myra, and my love to you Natasha, think of you. Monique, yeah, I get your point about them. All four of those singers, I admired them hugely. Actually, of the four, I think probably Bumbry has the most distinctive tambour. But of course Callas is very, very recognisable but is it really beautiful in the way that those four singers were? My own favourite singer, I’m sure I’ve mentioned it, Magda Olivero, my favourite singer of all time. She had of course, an extremely recognisable sound but some people would say that it’s not beautiful.

Well, Margaret, you’re not really comparing like with like when you compare Callas and Price. You’re getting very, very different qualities from both. I think they’re both very great singers. You know, as I said, Callas can be quite ugly sometimes. I don’t think everything Callas does is so wonderful. But on the other hand, in the roles that really suit her, like Lady Macbeth and Norma and above all “Gioconda,” she really is absolutely incomparable. But I don’t think she ever, I mean, for instance, in “Aida” and “Trovatore,” I would go for Price rather than Callas because in those two roles, you really do want a beautiful sound.

Right, thank you all very, very much and see you again on Sunday.