On March 11, Leontyne Price received the 55th annual Premio Puccini.

The prize was awarded at the Metropolitan Opera and it recognized the soprano for her Puccini interpretations.

Peter Gelb  was in attendance to receive the award for the soprano alongside the Puccini Festival delegation which included President Fabrizio Miracolo, Artistic Director Angelo Taddeo and General Director Stefano Coluccini.

The soprano’s family was also in attendance.

In a statement the Puccini Foundation said, “The Torre del Lago Puccini Festival Foundation and the City of Viareggio award the 55th Puccini Prize to Leontyne Price for embodying, with a voice of incomparable beauty and unparalleled artistic dignity, the vocal and dramatic ideal of Giacomo Puccini’s heroines. From the historic 1955 television production of ‘Tosca,’ with which she broke down the barriers of racial segregation and brought Puccini into the homes of millions of Americans, to her legendary recordings: from her movingly composed Cio-Cio-San to her poignantly pure Liù; from her artistically mature Manon Lescaut to Giorgetta del ‘Tabarro,’ Leontyne Price has spanned the entire Puccini universe with a mastery that few sopranos in history have matched. Her warm, dark, and brilliant timbre—which musicologists have defined as the lirico-spinto soprano par excellence—is the very voice that Giacomo Puccini would have wanted for his heroines: that female voice whose highest expression the Puccini Prize, since its inception in 1971, was created to celebrate.”

The Premio Puccini has been awarded to such artists as Angela Gheorghiu, Maria Callas, Anna Netrebko, Jonas Kaufmann, Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Maria Guleghina, and Montserrat Caballé, among many others.

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