MUSIC : Facing the Hard Truth at 15--She Was a Soprano

Soprano Margaret Price was lucky. She failed to achieve two goals of her youth.

She didn’t become a biology teacher. And she didn’t follow in the footsteps of her idol, the beloved, tragically short-lived contralto Kathleen Ferrier.

Instead, Price developed an international career as a soprano that began in 1962 when she sang Cherubino in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” for the Welsh National Opera, took her to Covent Garden a year later and subsequently blossomed in San Francisco, Munich, Chicago, Brussels, Vienna, La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

She sings with the Met Orchestra again tonight, with James Levine conducting Strauss’ Four Last Songs at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Price, 54, grew up in Blackwood, Wales, in a musical family, although neither of her parents were professional musicians. Her first exposure to lieder occurred when she heard her father accompanying other singers.

“I learned very early on in my life to sing Schubert and Schumann songs with him,” she said in a recent phone interview from her home in Munich, where she has lived since 1982. “I was influenced a lot by my father.”

At the time, her sights were set on teaching biology.

“I had an incredible love of biology,” she said. “I had a wonderful teacher in my school. I wanted to be like her. I would tutor students not doing wonderfully well in order that they could get through. We’d go into the garden and dig up worms.”

So she went off to study worms and such. But music intervened. “I was told I had a decent voice, that I shouldn’t let it pass and I should go and study music,” she said.

Her parents didn’t like the idea, however.

“It took a lot of persuasion to get my parents to agree. They didn’t want to see a daughter of theirs treading the boards, so to speak. Being Welsh, in a small city, perhaps they only saw the rough side of the theater.”

But “I’m a very strong character. I won them over. I had no idea, of course, that it was ever going to be as positive as it eventually turned out to be.”

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At the time, Ferrier was her role model, and for several years, Price doggedly pursued what actually was the wrong vocal range for her.

“I had other great giants, like [sopranos] Elisabeth Schumann and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who were also my idols,” Price said. “But I wanted to be the second Kathleen Ferrier. The stupidity of me. . . . It turned out I wasn’t a mezzo. I was only 15. I had a very mature voice at 15. It was obviously easy to misconstrue that I could have been a mezzo-soprano.”

When she was gently led to that truth that she was a soprano, “my whole world fell apart,” she said. “I burst into floods of tears. That was it. From that day on, I had to learn everything in the soprano keys. All of my German lieder I learned up to then, [as well as] things like ‘Messiah’ and Bach’s B-minor Mass and ‘Matthew Passion,’ I had sung as a mezzo.”

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Even so, she believes it was a lot easier for a singer to make a career then than it is now.

“It’s very, very difficult for young people coming out of college, no matter where you come from, to get a start,” she said. “I would hate to have to start now.

“There was so much music going on in those days. There were choral societies up and down, ‘Messiahs’ and ‘Elijahs,’ concerts, a lot of work for young singers. Bach cantatas. You name it. Today, it’s not done any more.

“Where are these young singers going to [cut] their teeth on that repertoire? They go directly from college or university straight into an opera house because that’s the only possibility for them-- if they’re lucky to do that. And with the financial shortage we have today, all over the world, the opera houses are having to cut down, too. There’s no place for other singers.”

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Price’s own career straddled the worlds of opera, concerts and recitals, which gave her a professional edge. “It was a great advantage because if you’ve been an opera singer all your life and at the age of mid-50s you find you can’t do it, it’s too late to [start to] sing lieder.

“They have to go hand-in-glove from the beginning, so that you learn all the repertoire. Also, you’re not just learning the notes, but the language. I mean, living with the art form, which is so different to singing opera.”

Her career hasn’t slowed down much in recent years.

“I’m doing a lot of lieder recitals and a lot of concerts, recording, but all in the lieder vein. I don’t do all that much opera anymore--’Ariadne,’ ‘Otello’ and ‘Don Carlo.’ My Mozart days are over.

“I’ve said goodby to all my favorite ladies, one by one. With Donna Anna [‘Don Giovanni’], it was very hard to say goodby, I must say, but it was 10 years [ago] when I last did my final performance of her.

“When it came to the Countess [‘The Marriage of Figaro’], I had made up my mind that I wanted to go out still being able to sing it, rather than having people say, ‘She used to be very good, but she can’t do it anymore.’ ”

Strauss’ Four Last Songs--the title is the publisher’s, not the composer’s--are “tricky,” Price said, “basically because of the tessitura. They jump from quite low to quite high. The tessitura tends on the whole through all four of them to lie in the higher part of the register. The first starts quite low, but only for a short time.

“They’re not pieces that every soprano wants to sing . . . because they’re a little afraid of them, and rightly so. They are difficult. No two questions about that. You certainly have to have a beautiful legato and a beautiful line, but along with that you have to interpret the words as well as color them. But that’s the art to any lieder singing.”

* Margaret Price will sing Strauss’ Four Last Songs with the Met Orchestra led by James Levine tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The Strauss program also includes “Tod und Verklarung” and “Don Quixote.” 8 p.m. Levine leads the orchestra again Thursday in works by Stravinsky, Gershwin and Mussorgsky. $20 to $69. (714) 755-2787.