Margaret Price

[2] 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".

[2] 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.

[4] 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 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.

[4] 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.

[8] Price was most famous for her Mozart roles, especially Fiordiligi, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro (after having sung Cherubino and Barbarina at the beginning of her career), and Pamina in The Magic Flute.

Price was also very active as a lieder singer, equally at home in the romantic idiom of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann or Richard Strauss and the Second Viennese School.