BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Full Name: Margaret Berenice Price
Description: Vocalist, Wales
Known For: Welsh soprano.
Instruments: Vocals
Music Styles: Jazz
Location: United States of America
Date Born: 13th April 1941
Location Born: Blackwood
Date Died: 28th January 2011
Location Died: Ceibwr Bay
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BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
Dame Margaret Berenice Price, DBE
A Welsh soprano.
Dame Margaret Berenice Price, DBE (13 April 1941 – 28 January 2011) was a Welsh soprano.
After graduation, she joined the Ambrosian Singers, performing with them on the soundtrack of the 1961 Charlton Heston film El Cid.
Unrecognised through the normal channel of competitions, instead her now converted father became her champion, writing to opera houses to arrange auditions. Resultantly, Price made her operatic debut in 1962, singing Cherubino in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the Welsh National Opera.
After her father wrote to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, in 1962 she auditioned and was turned down twice by musical director Georg Solti who said that she “lacked charm”.
However, she was accepted as an understudy thanks to casting director Joan Ingpen, and the forming of a close personal and professional relationship with composer James Lockhart.
Solti added a rider to her contract, stating that she should never expect to sing lead in the main house, so resultantly she sang minor roles as a mezzo.
But in 1963, her breakthrough came when Teresa Berganza cancelled a performance, and Price got the chance to take over as her nominated understudy – again in the role of Cherubino, a performance that made her famous overnight.
In 1967, she performed with Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Group in The Impresario, and as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
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.
During her career, Price made many recordings of operas and of lieder. One of her most famous recordings is the 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 the Irish Sea.
Price was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her services to music in 1993.
Price died on 28 January 2011 from heart failure at her home in Ceibwr, aged 69.