Word: diva
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...George du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894), set in the bohemian Latin Quarter of Paris, the sinister Svengali hypnotizes a tone-deaf gamine named Trilby and transforms her into an exquisite diva who becomes the toast of all Europe. When Svengali dies, so does Trilby's voice. In a two-hour, made-for-television movie titled Svengali, Jodie Foster (Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone), 19, plays a rock 'n' roll Trilby smoothed into a Streisand by Peter OToole's latter-day Svengali. Foster is on leave this semester from Yale, where she is a sophomore majoring...
Mstislav Rostropovich was there, wrapping his cello in a warm Russian bear hug as he dashed off two movements of a Haydn concerto. Violinists Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern were on hand too, the picture of collegial conviviality in a Vivaldi double concerto. Soprano Leontyne Price, the diva di tutte le dive, sang arias by Verdi, Richard Strauss and Puccini with resplendent warmth and freshness. And there was Pianist Rudolf Serkin, happily singing along as he performed in Beethoven's Choral Fantasy. At the end, Isaac Stern struck up Happy Birthday, and 2,600 fashionably dressed folk in Symphony...
...When my daughter was a little girl, I try to stay in Europa, to stay home with her," says the reluctant diva in her own Italo-English. Indeed, Freni temporarily quit the stage after the birth in 1956 of her daughter Micaela, born the year after Mirella's professional operatic debut and named for her role in Bizet's Carmen. It took two years of appeals by her husband, Pianist Leone Magiera, her coach and accompanist, to persuade her to resume her career. "Later, I am singing with La Scala, Covent Garden, Paris, Vienna, and it is difficult...
...Kennedy-Onassis marriage was not a success. He continued to see Maria and, reports Biographer Arianna Stassinopoulos, just before he died in 1975, he hired Roy Conn to start divorce proceedings against Jackie. But the diva's happiness was over. An affair with Tenor Giuseppe di Stefano was doomed; the poor man could not match her memory of Onassis. She declined rapidly after several illnesses, and it was not really surprising when she died in Paris, at 54, living in comfort but alone...
...Callas jealousy was legendary. The sight of her beloved Visconti, who was homosexual, merely talking with Leonard Bernstein sent her into a rage. Yet she did not always take herself seriously. At one of her classes, a student confessed to problems with "three or four notes." Replied the diva: "Likewise...