Margaret Price

Welsh operatic soprano

Dame Margaret Berenice Price (13 April 194128 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. 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. 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. In the years that followed, Price appeared as a guest at important opera houses. Her Metropolitan Opera debut came in 1985 as Desdemona in Verdi's Otello. In 1989 she appeared in the WNO production of Salome at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, in a performance attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Price was most famous for her Mozart roles, especially Fiordiligi, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, the Contessa in The Marriage of Figaro (after having sung Cherubino and Barbarina at the beginning of her career), and Pamina in The Magic Flute. Additionally, she sang Verdi roles, such as Amelia (Un ballo in maschera, a role she also recorded with Luciano Pavarotti), Elisabetta (Don Carlos) and Desdemona (Otello), her debut role at the Met, as well as the title role in Aida (also with Pavarotti in San Francisco, which was preserved on video), Richard Strauss's Ariadne (Ariadne auf Naxos) and Adriana Lecouvreur by Cilea. Price was also very active as a lieder singer, equally at home in the romantic idiom of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann or Richard Strauss and the Second Viennese School. During her career, Price made many recordings of operas and of lieder. One of her most famous recordings is as Isolde in Carlos Kleiber's complete recording of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, a role she never sang on stage. She was a Kammersängerin of the Bavarian State Opera.

Price retired to a 160 year old farmhouse on Ceibwr Bay, part of Moylegrove near Cardigan, Ceredigion, overlooking Cardigan Bay. From there, she successfully bred and showed Golden Retrievers, having the rear seats of her Chrysler removed to create what she termed a "dogmobile."