Margaret Price

My wife and I visited my Aunt Muriel when she was in hospital in Pontypool; she was not at all well and some days later she died. But we were able to talk with her. In the next bed to her was a lady named Price. Mrs Price was quite ill too but less tired than my aunt who kept dropping off to sleep while we were there, so we were able to talk at length with her.
It turned out that Mrs Price was the mother of one of the great sopranos of the last century: Margaret Price. She eagerly showed us photographs of her daughter in Germany where she was performing in grand opera.
I should have recognised her daughter because we lived quite close to each other in Blackwood, Gwent. She lived with her parents in a bungalow about a quarter of a mile from where we lived.
I had met her father a few times but did not like him at all (nor he me). He was a teacher in the local Technical School. Later he became the Principal of a College of Further Education where he ruled with a rod of iron, so to speak, and where he was not at all popular. I had the feeling that he didn't care about being popular.
But, apparently, he was instrumental in getting his daughter's career going, pestering opera companies to take her on (yes, he'd have been good at that!). Eventually she joined the Welsh National Opera Company and her career soared from then on.
She possessed one of the most pure soprano voices I have ever heard.
She retired in 1999 and has returned to Wales to live having lived many years abroad, especially Germany where she was exceedingly popular in her singing of Mozart, Wagner, Schubert and Richard Strauss.
I am reminded of her tonight having just heard Strauss's Four Last Songs at the opening prom in The Albert Hall. I heard Margaret Price sing them in Cardiff some years ago - wonderful.