A Dame to remember

This 1990 portrait of Dame Margaret Price is in German, but don't let that put you off. All musical excerpts (starting with her justly-celebrated Isolde,  recorded with Carlos Kleiber) are allowed to run their course without BBC-style interruption, and the talky bits should be fairly easy to follow.

Thank you to reader Adam for uncovering.

Comments

[Capriccio blog]

Thanks for this! Lot's of nice little nuggets - e.g. that she was in the choir for the EMI Callas Anna Bolena! Amazing also to have Solti too saying such complimentary things when he was such an obstacle early on.

A superb artist, and a voice of incredibly rare quality.

Curious that her German is so fluent, and her pronunciation so good, but that she occasionally makes some very basic errors.
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Intermezzo replies - It's the Welsh accent that makes her German pronunciation so good!

[PLIMPTON]

oh how wonderful - God, she was sublime when she sang in tune (which later she didn't). And beneath her rather raucous sense of humour, the underlying sadness in her life too - thank you, Adam, whoever you are

[Rannaldini]

Her German is good because she lived in Grunwald, a suburb of Munich for many years because she was terrified of flying and so liked to be "based" rather than constantly jetting.

At least - that it was is said!

There is a story - apocryphal mind you, that after she had worked with Kleiber on Tristan, she met him in the bakers in said area of Munich and they were in the same queue, and he more or less just ignored her and barely spoke to her, ((having stormed off and left her standing there like a lemon during the last recording session.)) Collected his bread and stalked off! Weird if true.

[DESR]

The ROH Otello of 1980 with her as Desdemona and Kleiber conducting (oh, plus Domingo too) is about my favourite recording, absolutely hair-raising stuff.

[Oroveso]

I only saw her in the theatre a few times, as Desdemona and the Countess in LE NOZZE, both conducted by Solti. Interestingly, for a large woman, she allowed herself to be costumed respectively in what appeared to be shiny aluminum foil for the former and fire-engine red for the latter. I met her only once, at a reception in St. Louis. We were seated on a sofa and as a waiter came by passing a large silver tray of oysters on the half shell, she called him over, requested that he deposit the tray on the coffee table in front of the sofa and then proceeded to methodically devour the entire tray. She did this all with great gusto, humor and bags of charm.

[Hedgehog]

Sincere thanks for this! I've only just caught up with it, and what a huge pleasure it has been to spend an hour on a dismal January afternoon in Dame Margaret's company listening to her remarkable story again. There are some superb examples of her craft here, some of which I hadn't heard before - the wonderful Don Carlos excerpt demonstrates precisely the huge vocal range and technical-expressive skills required for this immensely demanding role. No wonder I wince at some modern exponents' struggles.

Although Price enjoyed a highly successful operatic career, the film only hints at the greatness of her Lieder singing, her first real love. We are so fortunate that she made numerous wonderful recordings, and anyone who has not collected all her Orfeo discs, when she was in her absolute prime, should do so without hesitation before they disappear. But if I want to demonstrate to an unbeliever how the greatest singing can reach such a pinnacle of perfection in both technical skill and expression, I reach, as I have just now done, for her Liszt group on my old CfP disc of 'Romantic Songs' (Schumann, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Liszt)and play 'Kling leise, mein Lied'; the consistent purity of tone, combined with amazing control yet seamless fluidity with which the high tessitura and the frequent leaps are floated in one seemingly endless phrase, make this truly sublime.

In my Pantheon Dame Margaret sits comfortably alongside that other great Price - Leontyne. The Liszt group, by the way, is currently available on EMI coupled with some equally exquisite Strauss. Maybe Intermezzo could find a link here for readers. You really do need to hear this.