Up for auction a RARE! "Welsh Soprano" Margaret Price Hand Signed TLS dated 1985.

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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. She remained only briefly with that ensemble and

later admitted to having struggled somewhat during her time with that group due

to her inadequate skills at sight-singing. 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. 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 she formed of a close personal and

professional relationship with pianist and conductor James Lockhart.

Solti added a rider to her contract, stating that she should never expect to

sing lead in the main house, so she sang minor roles as a mezzo. Her breakthrough came in 1963 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.  After that, Lockhart convinced Price to take

further singing lessons to improve her technique and develop the luminous high

range that made her one of the most popular lyric sopranos of the 1970s and 1980s. 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. As Price did not enjoy travelling, she always

kept a "home" stage, where she stayed and performed for the majority

of each year. Initially this was Covent Garden, but from 1971 she made Germany

her base, initially at Cologne Opera where she made her debut in Don Giovanni, and latterly the Bavarian State Opera in

Munich, where she lived until retirement in 1999. Price hence formed a

professional relationship with Otto Klemperer, who conducted her first recording of a major

role in a complete opera – Fiordiligi in Mozart's Così fan tutte. The 1972 recording established Price as a

Mozart specialist. 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.