For those unfamiliar with the glamorous world of opera: Leontyne Price was the first African American lyric soprano to receive international acclaim. She also became the Metropolitan Opera’s regular — and most popular — leading female singer during their 21-season relationship. In brief, she’s a legend. Kevin Simmonds, who trained as a classical singer, takes a close look at the icon’s public life and career, and reckons with how her presence shaped his own journey from his days as a music student to his pursuit of an entirely different profession in his latest collection The Monster I Am Today: Leontyne Price and a Life in Verse.
In the autobiographical sections, Simmonds employs the prose paragraph or vignette to craft a moving narrative about growing up a queer Black boy in New Orleans. His temperamental stepfather was embarrassed by his sissy mannerisms, which also made him subject to getting bullied in school. “It lasts,” Simmonds states, “seeing Black men and boys as threats, humiliators.” His mother, consumed by the television, “devoted her attention to whatever seemed farthest from our life on North Galvez Street.” But she did offer some respite — and much needed mother-son intimacy — when “the house shook with LPs and 45s” and they took to dancing freely in the living room.
It was a chance encounter with a Leontyne Price performance broadcast on television, however, that marked the beginning of a lifelong passion for the opera singer: “My 12-year old body can hardly bear the recognition — this is what I want: adulation.”
But the more poignant moments described in Simmonds’ narrative occur during college while he struggles to find his own voice and sense of belonging within a musical genre dominated by white practitioners: “my self-edict was to epitomize excellence, which seemed to require disavowing and overcoming Blackness to achieve it.” Yet he couldn’t turn away from his “gay adolescent dream,” which was to have “a voice that gave me characters, or allowed me to play a character. Operatic.” Throughout his education, he looked to Price for inspiration since she had already broken the race barrier. He also clung to the wisdom of his early singing teachers, who were Black and who had cautioned him, “Don’t let them change your voice. It’s a naturally dark sound. Like Price.”
The lyrical portion of the book is dedicated to Price’s professional journey, as voiced through Price and the many notable figures who encountered her, like the actress Dorothy Dandridge who recognizes Price as a groundbreaker but with limits: “When do we expect,” Dandridge ponders, “they’ll let us / all the way in?” Those limits are explicitly expressed by the white music critics like Bernard H. Haggin, who famously quipped: “When I look at what is happening on stage, my imagination still cannot accommodate itself to a black in the role of a white.” And then there was the president of NBC in 1955, who objected to the “casting of a negress” in a televised version of Tosca.
Simmonds draws strength from Price’s history facing adversity, which included criticism by some Black activists that she wasn’t doing enough with her access and visibility in service to the Black struggle. She offers a tempered response: “I have my own way of expressing involvement.” To fortify the defense that Price was, despite the naysayers at the time, significant to the cultural and political shifts in the country, Simmonds reveals that the FBI noted her as a potential threat, keeping a file on Price for her associations with Communists, “sex deviants,” and “Negro agitators” like LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) and Dr. Martin Luther King. “It is unknown how far she will go to support the so-called Negro cause,” the report concluded.
Additionally, Simmonds lets Price speak directly to her difficult position, pressured to be an ambassador for both sides in a never-ending racial conflict: “All token Blacks have the same experience. I have been pointed at as a solution to things that have not yet begun to be solved, because pointing at us token Blacks eases consciences of millions, and this is dreadfully wrong,” Price states.
Although Simmonds’ praises moments during Price’s career that he finds particularly touching — such as when Price sang for an AIDS benefit at Carnegie Hall in 1987, moved by the fact that “Liz [Taylor] stuck by Rock [Hudson] / and raised millions” — what keeps the Leontyne Price section from becoming hagiography is Simmonds’ progression through the details of her professional highlights and the grandeur of her celebrity status to arrive at the single, most personal connection, what he calls “a racialized sound.” Here he reaches back to the Met’s first Black singer, Marion Anderson, whose voice also bears a darkness “emerged from the Black church.” That sound was identified in the young boy, who in turn found it in Price, and became the impetus for claiming a racial history in his voice, as both an act of protest and a power of identity:
“Black sound”
acousmatic blackness: that which signifies —
earnest or otherwise — a particular sound
emancipated or emaciated (depending on one’s
discriminating faculties) —
drawn from coon songs field hollers vaudeville
work songs ring shouts spirituals —
in this case notatable and singable
by gowned recitalists
in the bends of pianos
but often bulging through
the delicate skins of European art song
and the aria
Simmonds underscores this bond not only as a Black artistic and cultural lineage, but also as life-saving enlightenment: “I saw in Price how to abdicate the burden of my own life, to correct my misalignment, to evacuate my child self, my teen self, my young adult self to safety.”
Perhaps readers might be disappointed that this speaker, who has detailed his arduous effort to find his place in the world of classical music, abandons the singing dream and turns to the narrower and less amplified field of poetry. But the beauty of this story is in its journey, not its outcome. Simmonds offers important lessons about the emotional cost of perseverance, the possibility of triumph and the unavoidability of obstacles that sometimes lead to failure. The Monster I Am Today is fierce and revelatory. The monster — which Simmonds informs us comes from the Latin word monere, to remind, bring to (one’s) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach — is the body as a record of history, archive of personal, cultural, and political experiences. To that end, this book achieves what it set out to present: a sifting through the past to make sense of what happened, and to make peace with the paths not taken: “Whenever I hear or think of [Leontyne Price], I regret I’ll never make a sound others can hardly bear, which is an agony and a consolation.”
[Published by TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press on Julyt 15, 2021, 184 pages, $20.00[