AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts Friday afternoon 85
compositional process by considering a swath of unexamined historiography that both precedes
and follows LStB’s 1956 publication.
PERFORMING AidA AND PERFORMING LEONTYNE PRICE
Jenni Veitch-Olson
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Verdi’s Aida has caught and continues to catch our imaginations. According to a quick
JSTOR search, from 1876 to the present, scholarly interest in the opera reveals almost two
thousand articles, from not only the music disciplines, but also those of history, literature,
and cultural studies. The New York Metropolitan Opera archives boasts 1,103 performances of
the opera, making Aida the second-most performed work in the institution’s history. In collaboration
with Disney Theatrical, Tim Rice and Elton John adapted the opera into a popular
Broadway musical production, and, under the auspices of the PBS Great Performances series,
the documentary “Aida’s Brothers and Sisters” shares an history of African American opera
singers. From musicology to the Disney Corporation, Verdi’s Aida strikes a nerve, but how
and why? This presentation asserts that much of the work’s late-twentieth-century reception is
part and parcel of the narrative of Leontyne Price, the first African American diva.
Although many women have donned the drab slave-like costume to assume the character,
Price forever changed the legacy of the work with her opera debut in the title role in January
1957 with the San Francisco Opera. Twenty-eight years later, in 1985, Price received a lengthy
standing ovation for her final performance at the Met in this role. That Price both debuted
and retired as Verdi’s Ethiopian princess is not a surprise; throughout her career and even presently
in retirement, Price is almost synonymous with the character in our popular American
imagination. Opera critics and admirers alike use Price’s many performances of the heroine as
the benchmark for other singers who assume the role. Yet the important performance legacy
of Price as Aida, or the relationship between any singer and her character, has not been the
purview of musicological opera studies.
This work broadens the recent critical conversations about Aida by Smart (2000), Bergeron
(2002), Huebner (2002), among others, and continues to integrate performance studies methodologies
into opera studies, by following in the steps of Risi (2002), Levin (2004), Duncan
(2004), Schneider (2004), and Rutherford (2006). Additionally, this study sheds more light on
the integral and often oppositional contributions of African Americans to opera and elite culture,
and theorizes that Price’s interpretation of Aida is an inextricable linking of a performed
self and a performed character. Uniting an in-depth reading of the primary and secondary
material on Price to that of Verdi’s commentary on his grandest of operas, via Budden and
Busch, my presentation historicizes Price’s Aida performances, and examines why one critic
from Milan commented that “our great Verdi would have found her the ideal Aida.”