Word: primas
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Bright in the pattern of New York's history have been the dozens of prima donnas who made news with every utterance, set fashions in food and dress, left vivid memories with every song they sang. Old men still live who remember pious Jenny Lind when she trilled in gaslit Castle Garden, a protégée of that amazing Yankee, Phineas T. Barnum. Adelina Patti was singing at the old Academy of Music on 14th Street when broughams first brought Vanderbilts and Astors to the shiny new doors of the Metropolitan Opera House...
...prima donna roll-call were taken this week there would be no answers from the great singers of 50 years ago. The last to die, at a rich old age, was plump little Marcella Sembrich (TIME, Jan. 21). Of the living singers no longer singing there remains mountainous Luisa Tetrazzini who in Italy squabbles publicly over money with her 34-year-old husband. In France there is old Emma Calvé, proud with the assurance that her Carmen has never been surpassed. In a walk-up studio in Bronxville (N. Y.), great Olive Fremstad lives grimly surrounded by her operatic...
...bursting. All correspondents were shut out. Everyone inside was sworn to utter secrecy. An hour and a half later the Opera disgorged. That night it filled again with the same secrecy-sworn galaxy of leaders. They heard Tannhauser sung. To perform by special command of Der Reichsjilhrer, beauteous Prima Dona Maria Mueller, half German and half Czech, had been all but jerked off the boat on, which she was about to sail to Manhattan's Metropolitan...
...interested. At the Metropolitan in Manhattan, where she made her debut in 1906, she continued to have her own way. As the goosegirl in Die Konigskinder she drove the property man to distraction by her successful insistence upon having live geese on the stage. She was the only Metropolitan prima donna ever to have her own permanent dressing room. Two older singers had been bickering for one for weeks but Manager Gatti-Casazza was obdurate. Miss Farrar went to his office casually one day, asked if any one would mind if she took that dirty airless room by the stairs...
...topped that transcontinental record with another in the opposite direction, in 10 hr. 4 min. Last month he beat that record by two minutes, flew back to Cleveland to win the Thompson Trophy, World's No. 1 closed-course race (100 mi. at 248 m.p.h.). A temperamental prima donna on the ground. Turner is a cold, nerveless machine...