Sharon Lawrence

Sharon Lawrence Instagram – Repost @isabelwilkerson : In this briefest of months, let us bask in the stirringly poignant ovation for one of the greatest sopranos of all time as she tries to absorb the magnitude of her audience’s embrace.
Leontyne Price, the first African-American to reach international acclaim in the rarefied world of opera, turns 98 today.
She was born in the depths of Jim Crow, in Laurel, Mississippi, on February 10, 1927, to James Price, a sawmill worker, and Katherine Price, a midwife. When she was five, her parents traded in a family phonograph as a down payment on an upright piano for her. When she was nine, she saw the pioneering soprano Marian Anderson in recital in Jackson, which fueled her desire to be a singer.
During the Great Migration, she boarded a segregated bus from Mississippi to Ohio in 1944 to pursue her dreams at Central State College in Wilberforce. She was filled with anxiety about leaving her family but knew she had to go north to “carry out the plans she had carefully outlined for later in life.” There, she studied under Paul Robeson and won a scholarship to Juilliard and thus the chance to pursue opera.
In 1955, she became the first African-American to appear on television as the lead in an opera when she performed in Puccini’s “Tosca.” Though the performance aired nationwide on NBC, several NBC affiliates canceled the broadcast in protest.
She would go on to star in “Aida,” “Carmen,” “Madame Butterfly” and other lead roles. But it was her debut at the Metropolitan Opera (as Leonora in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore”) on January 27, 1961, that ignited a 42-minute ovation, one of the longest in Met history.
She would win 13 Grammy Awards for her recordings and appear on the cover of TIME. In 2007, a British magazine named her to its list of the 20 Best Sopranos of all time, ranking her fourth, after Maria Callas, Dame Joan Sutherland and Victoria de los Angeles.
This clip is from her 1985 farewell performance at the Met, where she received such a rapturous standing ovation that she could barely contain her emotions as she tried to remain in character (as enslaved princess Aida dreaming of freedom). A powerful moment in music history. #blackhistorymonth | Posted on 12/Feb/2025 02:50:21