Margaret Price
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Dame Margaret Price DBE (born April 13, 1941 in Blackwood, Monmouthshire) is a Welsh soprano.
[edit] Biography
Price, who came from a music-loving family, started singing for her own pleasure early in her life, but originally did not plan to make a living of it - she dreamed of becoming a biology teacher.
At the age of 15 her music teacher at school organised an audition with Charles Kennedy Scott who convinced her to study with him at Trinity College of Music in London and even got her a scholarship. Over the next years the singer was trained as a mezzosoprano.
Later she joined the Ambrosian Singers, but was reluctant to enter singing competitions. So Price's discovery was largely attributable to her father, who aggressively campaigned on her behalf to various opera companies. The result was her operatic debut in 1962 singing Cherubino in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro at the Welsh National Opera.
In 1962 Price joined the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in London where she started singing smaller roles. Her breakthrough came when Teresa Berganza had to call off a performance at short notice and Price took over as her understudy - as Cherubino again, a performance that made her famous overnight.
The conductor and pianist James Lockhart convinced Price to take singing lessons again to improve her technique and develop the luminous high scale that would make her one of the most popular lyric sopranos of the seventies and eighties.
Price also got supported by the world famous conductor Otto Klemperer who recorded her first complete recording of a great Mozart role: Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte, a recording that established her fame as a Mozart specialist.
In the years that followed, Price appeared as a guest at all important opera houses in the world although her sensational Metropolitan Opera debut came much later (in 1985 as Desdemona in Giuseppe Verdi's Otello.
Since she did not like travelling much, she always kept a "home" stage, where she stayed the greater part of the year - first Covent Garden, then Cologne and since 1971 the Bavarian State Opera in Munich where she lived until she retreated from stage in 1999.
Afterwards she returned to Wales where she took home in a small town by the sea and lives with her dogs.
[edit] Repertory
Price was most famous for her great Mozart-portraits, especially Fiordiligi, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Contessa in Le Nozze di Figaro (after having sung Cherubino and Barbarina at the beginning of her career), Pamina in Die Zauberflöte.
Later she also sang some Verdi-roles, like Amelia (Un ballo in maschera, a role she sang on record too next to Luciano Pavarotti), Elisabetta (Don Carlo) and Desdemona (Otello=, her debut role at the MET). She also sang Richard Strauss's Marschallin (Der Rosenkavalier) and Ariadne (Ariadne auf Naxos) and Adriana Lecouvreur by Cilea. All in all she kept her repertory limited due to fear of overstraining her voice.
Price was very active as a lieder singer, too, equally at home in the romantic idiom of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann or Richard Strauss, and that of the Second Viennese School.
During her long carreer, Price made many recordings both of operas and of lieder. Perhaps her most famous record is the complete recording of Richard Wagners Tristan und Isolde conducted by Carlos Kleiber, a role she never sang on stage either.
Price is a Kammersängerin of both the Bavarian State Opera and the Vienna State Opera. She was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her services to music in 1993.
[edit] Honours
- Bayerische Kammersängerin
- Commander of the British Empire, (CBE), 1982
- Dame Commander of the British Empire, (DBE), 1993
