Leontyne Price, as Lenore – the aria “D'amor sull'ali rosee” from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore

Leontyne Price, as Lenore – the aria “D'amor sull'ali rosee” (On the rosy wings of love) from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore

The Metropolitan Opera invited Ms. Price to sing a pair of performances as Aida in 1958, but she turned down the offer on the advice of friends, including Peter Herman Adler, director of NBC Opera. In his autobiography, William Warfield writes that Adler said, "Leontyne is to be a great artist. When she makes her debut at the Met, she must do it as a lady, not a slave."

In 1959, after hearing her in Il Trovatore that August at Verona with tenor Franco Corelli, Met General Manager Rudolf Bing invited her to join the Met company in the 1960–61 season. On January 27, 1961, she and Corelli made a triumphant double-debut in Il Trovatore. The final ovation lasted at least 35 minutes, one of the longest in Met history. (Price often said her friends or family had timed it at 42 minutes, and that was the number used in her later publicity.)

In his review, The New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that Price's "voice, warm and luscious, has enough volume to fill the house with ease, and she has a good technique to back up the voice itself. She even took the trills as written, and nothing in the part as Verdi wrote it gave her the least bit of trouble. She moves well and is a competent actress. But no soprano makes a career of acting. Voice is what counts, and voice is what Miss Price has."

This is a live telecast of the role dated 1963.