"Mistress of Stage & Score"

In her travels about Europe, figures Soprano Leontyne Price, she must have walked several dozen times through Milan's Piazza della Scala, past the ornate brown-brick theater with the triple-arched main entrance. She never went in. "I swore," says she, "that I would not enter even as a tourist until I sang there." Last week she entered, singing: at 33 she was making her La Scala debut in Aida, and the demanding audience recognized almost at once that she would be a hit.

Handling her big, liquid soprano voice with faultless accuracy, Singer Price achieved an Aida that was at once feline and tender, sweet and aggressive. She won bravas after her opening trio with Radames and Amneris (a place in the opera that has not drawn applause at La Scala in years), got many more ovations as she ranged effortlessly from finespun pianissimos to brilliantly ringing fortes. "Brava, Leonessa!" cried someone in the audience, while a second voice corrected: "She is more like a panther than a lioness." Said one critic: "Our great Verdi would have found her the ideal Aida." When another critic regretted that Soprano Price's color might keep her from other parts, a Scala official promised that there would be no color bar: "The public will have to get used to it. If she sings Butterfly and anybody objects, we'll say she's a suntanned Butterfly."

For Leontyne Price, the climb to La Scala's stage seemed remarkably easy. She started her musical career playing the piano at funerals at home in Laurel, Miss., where her father was a sawmill laborer and her mother a midwife who "delivered more babies than necessary so I could have piano lessons." At Central State College in Ohio, Leontyne discovered she had a voice, went on to Juilliard, where Critic-Composer Virgil Thomson heard her and asked her to appear in his opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. From there she joined the touring revival of Porgy and Bess and married her leading man, Baritone William Warfield.

She made her grand opera debut in the NBC-TV production of Tosca ("I was the first black Tosca that big audience had seen"), later made her European grand opera debut in Aida at the Vienna Staatsoper, guided by Conductor Herbert von Karajan. Since then Leontyne has had an uninterrupted string of European successes, particularly in Italy. After La Scala, Soprano Price has one more giant step ahead of her in the U.S.: next season she will sing yet another Verdian role--Leonora in Il Trovatore--in her debut at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera.

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