Word: primas
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...Prima Donna on first violin...
Slurs & Shakes. The history of bel canto and the reasons for its revival are chronicled in a lively new book by Musicologist Henry Pleasants, The Great Singers (Simon & Schuster; $7.50). The first prima donnas of bel canto were not donnas at all but male sopranos and contraltos. These castrati, who commanded the center stage of opera for more than 100 years, until the end of the 18th century, constituted about 70% of all male singers. They postured and strutted on the stage like peacocks improvising elaborate vocal filigrees, inserting grace notes or unaccompanied passages, some of which lasted as long...
...that this straitjacket is so confining that some pop vocalists such as Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra, whose jazz improvisations are a direct counterpart of bel canto, are "technically better than most opera singers." The voice of Ella Fitzgerald, whom he regards as the prima donna of pop, "is so naturally placed that she can sing more in a week than most opera singers can in a month." The falsetto wailings of the Beach Boys and Beatle Paul McCartney all echo the early 19th century bel canto singers, he adds. Beyond their interpretive freedom, the major link between pop singers...
Bernhardt was 15 when the Duc de Morny, one of her mother's lovers, arranged for her to study at the French Conservatoire. Two years later, she was in the Comedie Franchise, and was acquiring a reputation as a tempestuous prima donna. By the time she was 20, she had taken a lover and given birth to an illegitimate son. Then began the long parade: short runs with a vast assortment of lovers, longer runs and growing fame on the stage. She was the queen in Victor Hugo's Ruy Bias, Phèdre in Racine...
Died. Mary Garden, 92, prima donna of the opera from the 1900s to the 1930s; of pneumonia; in Aberdeen, Scotland (see MUSIC...