Margaret Price

Dame Margaret Berenice Price (13 April 1941 – 28 January 2011) was a Welsh soprano.

Price was born in Blackwood, near Caerphilly in South Wales. Born with deformed legs, she underwent surgery at age four and suffered pain in her legs for the rest of her life. She often looked after her younger brother John, who was born with a mental handicap. The family had ties in Cardigan and north Pembrokeshire and often spent their summer holiday in Moylgrove.

Her father, a talented amateur pianist, was opposed to a musical career, and hence she never attended an eisteddfod and was aiming for a career as a biology teacher. She was educated at Pontllanfraith Secondary School, near Caerphilly. When she was 15, her school music teacher organised an audition with Charles Kennedy Scott, who persuaded her to study with him at Trinity College of Music in London and obtained a scholarship for her. Over the next few years Price trained as a mezzo-soprano.

After graduation, she joined the Ambrosian Singers, performing with them on the soundtrack of the 1961 Charlton Heston film El Cid. She remained only briefly with that ensemble and later admitted to having struggled somewhat during her time with that group due to her inadequate skills at sight-singing.

Unrecognised through the normal channel of competitions, she was championed by her now-converted father, who wrote to opera houses to arrange auditions. As a result, Price made her operatic debut in 1962, singing Cherubino in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the Welsh National Opera.

After her father wrote to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in 1962, she auditioned and was turned down twice by musical director Georg Solti who said that she “lacked charm”. However, she was accepted as an understudy, thanks to casting director Joan Ingpen, and she formed of a close personal and professional relationship with pianist and conductor James Lockhart. Solti added a rider to her contract, stating that she should never expect to sing lead in the main house, so she sang minor roles as a mezzo. Her breakthrough came in 1963 when Teresa Berganza cancelled a performance and Price got the chance to take over as her nominated understudy, again in the role of Cherubino, a performance that made her famous overnight.

After that, Lockhart convinced Price to take further singing lessons to improve her technique and develop the luminous high range that made her one of the most popular lyric sopranos of the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1967, she performed with Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Group in Mozart’s The Impresario, and as Titania in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 1968, critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor called her singing “brilliant, flexible and large scale” as Constanze in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Glyndebourne. …

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