Word: primae
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...does happen on occasion that they will run a passenger ragged around the deck. One excitable prima donna one day heard a rap on her door, asked "Who is there?" Came a voice: "It is I." Thoughtlessly she opened the door. In poured the reporters and cameramen from whom she was hiding...
There she became the Great Jeritza to a gay, music-loving Vienna. Her fame grew with her repertoire. A beautiful prima donna has always seemed a phenomenon. Here was one magnificently built, with sea-blue eyes and golden hair. The public raved. Composers made their music for her. She created Strauss' Ariadne, later the Empress in Die Frau ohne Schatten. She was his Salome, his Octavian (Der Rosenkavalier). He saw her in Max Reinhardt's revival of Offenbach's Belle Hélène and an idea was born. It simmered and swelled until last winter...
Simplicity and a superb vitality have made Jeritza. She wanted to be a prima donna. She is a prima donna and nothing interferes. She sings twice a week at the Metropolitan, their highest salaried singer. She rehearses. She sleeps. Other singers may ail. Jeritza has never missed a performance. Her public (she used to call it pooblic) must not be disappointed, and to bear out the principle she sang a concert once in Brooklyn on one foot, the other so badly sprained she had to be carried on the stage and propped against the piano. Yet trembling with fatigue when...
...door. In the morning there were no shoes, polished or unpolished. Knowing no English, wanting no more scenes, Olszewska stole from the train in her red bedroom slippers, drove at once to the shopping district, scuffed up and down Michigan Avenue till she could find shoes worthy of a prima donna's first entrance...
...there have been vocal gymnastics, new languages for new operas, right living. There have been few books, few friends, no beaus. There have been the rigid standards bred by the First Christian Church of Kansas City, a public to be a little suspicious of, and a handful of haughty prima donna ways which have not helped her popularity...