Leontyne Price sings Cleopatra's "Se pieta di me non senti" LIVE (1956) Giulio Cesare

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American Opera Society 9 October 1956
Cleopatra: Leontyne Price
Conductor Arnold Gamson

This is my favourite recording of Leontyne Price's. Although most famed for her Verdi and Puccini, she had a broad repertoire and this early Handel recording is an exquisitely beautiful, refined and touching live performance. She was only 29 here and the voice clearly sounds younger than in the recordings and performances that made her famous in the 1960s, but already the peerless beauty of the sound is there, that wonderful legato combined with a radiantly beautiful timbre and incredible dynamic control (those diminuendos!). And I hear something here too that she later lost: a genuine vulnerability and sadness in the sound that draws me in like nothing else she recorded. From the beginning of the recitative I hear a real character realised in sound.

Price was an incredible vocalist, possessing in her prime one of the most highly developed techniques ever heard amongst Verdian singers, and the sound is one of the fullest, rounded and voluptuous that you are ever likely to hear. Yet I am not a fan of hers in general because I feel that her highest artistic goal was vocal excellence, rather than artistic expression. So often, she will be delivering some piece of astonishing vocalism, and I find myself thinking that it's so divorced from the character or dramatic situation that I can't enjoy it. That famous timbre, which I hear as round and golden, like an orb, is often described as regal, which is meant as a compliment, but it's a double edged sword. There is almost never any sense of vulnerability in her sound, she is unwilling or unable to open herself to her audience, and the golden voice becomes a golden mask, beautifully wrought, perfect even beyond imagination, but ultimately only a simulacra of what lies beneath, which is her true humanity. This may seem a fanciful way of explaining my response to her recordings, but this is an attempt at definition which I feel is necessary when an artist is so clearly of an extremely rare calibre and is so obviously unworthy of dismissal of disrespect. She rightly has legions of fans and devotees, but I cannot shake the fact that find it hard to relate to her as an artist, and am rarely moved by her singing: I think the lack of vulnerability is the key. I'm perfectly willing to admit that this may be a shortcoming of mine but I do think that vulnerability is a prerequisite of intimacy which in my opinion is the foundation of moving interpretation.

Whether any of this can be explained partly in the context of the hardships and hurdles she faced in her career, i.e. being a black artist in the American operatic scene of the 1950s and 60s, might be a reasonable partial theory to posit - perhaps the perfection with its positive and negative aspects are simply what was required for one of the first great black American operatic artists to succeed to the level that she did. In any case, this early recording leaves me breathless and on its own would grant her entry into the pantheon of greats.
libretto

Che sento? Oh dio! Morrà Cleopatra ancora.
Anima vil, che parli mai? Deh taci!
Avrò, per vendicarmi,
in bellicosa parte,
di Bellona in sembianza un cor di Marte.
Intanto, oh Numi, voi che il ciel reggete,
difendete il mio bene!
Ch'egli è del seno mio conforto e speme.

Se pietà di me non senti,
giusto ciel, io morirò.
Tu da pace a' miei tormenti,
o quest'alma spirerò.

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