Word: diva
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...readers of TIME'S 1956 cover story on Maria Meneghini Callas will remember (if not, see cut), the diva can sing like a bird and feud like a fishwife. Front pages ever since have attested to her tantrum power, and there have been moments when the sounds of her critics almost obscured the sound of her voice. But last week, in her first Metropolitan Opera appearance of the season, Callas the singer soared above Callas the shrew, and sang Traviata with an impassioned poignancy unmatched in years. See Music, Diva's Return...
...Diva Callas could scarcely have picked a worse evening to stage a walkout. Rome had not heard her for two years, while rumors floated about that her voice was going; for her return, she had chosen one of her outstanding roles, and one of the most challenging in the repertory. As Norma, the Druid priestess, Callas came before her audience looking strikingly handsome in flowing robes, her dark hair aglitter with silver leaves. Midway in the first act, when she launched into the opera's most famed aria, Casta Diva, the house was hushed in taut expectancy...
...Elsa Maxwell, and sobbingly told opera officials outside her door that she could not go on. Because Callas herself had refused to have an understudy at rehearsal, the management had no choice but to cancel the rest of the performance. Cracked an American in the audience: "After this Casta Diva, they may just cast a diva into the Tiber...
...hollered as he pulled her elbow out of his ear. "Who do you think you are?" The little girl drew herself up. "I," she announced in a powerful voice, "am the leading lady!" The crowd fell back, an aisle was made, and down it the six-year-old diva swept grandly to her dressing room...
...first slated appearance this season of one of the Metropolitan Opera's biggest-drawing stars, Soprano Renata Tebaldi, was canceled fortnight ago when her mother had a severe heart attack. At week's end Diva Tebaldi, agreeing to appear despite her desperate anxiety to remain at her mother's bedside, was again due to take the stage (in a matinee Aïda). She never got near the Met. Mrs. Teobaldo Tebaldi died that morning. The singer, beside herself with grief, was put under heavy sedation. The only child of long-estranged Italian parents, Spinster Tebaldi...