Diva

Diva (pronounced dee-vuh or dee-vah)

(1) A distinguished female singer; a prima donna.

(2) By later extension, any female celebrity, especially one who sings.

(3) In slang (use can be derogatory or affectionate),a person with an exalted opinion of their worth, is demanding of others and fussy about personal privileges.

1864: From the Italian diva (diva, goddess, a fine or beautiful woman), from the Latin dīva (goddess), feminine of dīvus (divine, divine one; notably a deified mortal (and related to related to deus (god, deity)), from the Old Latin deivā, from the Proto-Italic deiwā (goddess), feminine of deiwos (god), from the primitive Indo-European deywós (god) & (dyeu- (to shine (in derivatives: “sky, heaven, god”).  Diva, divaism & divadom are nouns and divaesque, divalike & divaish are adjectives; the noun plural is dive or (more commonly in English) divas.  The verbs divaed & divaing have been used but are non-standard.

The use of “diva” began on the Opera stages and it’s not clear who was the first soprano so labeled.  The first known reference to a singer a “diva” dates from 1864 but some historians claim the model for the mode of behavior was the Spanish soprano Maria Malibran (1808-1836) who before dying tragically young was notorious for her demanding personality and dramatic ways; retrospectively “diva” was applied to her.  During her lifetime it was used also of the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind (1820-1887) although apparently only in relation to the beauty of her voice (she was dubbed “the Swedish Nightingale” and she’s remembered also “Jenny Lind soup” (made with mashed sago or rutabaga or sago, chicken stock thickened with a roux, Gruyère cheese, sage, egg yolks and heavy cream, all topped topped with beaten egg whites),  The link to her is said to be it being her favorite dish to sooth the chest and vocal cords prior to a performance.

Lindsay Lohan on the panel of The Masked Singer (2019).

Divas (real and imagined) are popular figures to parody and the word has produced a number of derived forms including (1) the nouns divaism (diva-like behavior) & divadom (the condition of being a diva; the sphere of divas) and (2) the adjectives divaesque (behavior reminiscent of a diva (the comparative more divaesque, the superlative most divaesque)), divalike & divaish (pertaining to the manner expected of a diva (some noting of the latter the anagram was HIV/AIDS)).  The adjective divaistic and the verbs divaed & divaing (doing something in a divaish way) are non-standard and used for jocular effect.  In music, the noun “diva house” described a late 1980s subgenre of house music, much associated with booming vocals (handbag house listed usually as the synonym although, being pop culture, there are likely some who find a distinction)).  The noun divo is used of “a male diva” (a man with the traits characteristic of a typical diva (used also with the implication the word should summon in the mind "deviant" (ie he's a bit gay)).  Diva (in the sense used in English) was also borrowed from the Italian in un-adapted form in Catalan, Dutch, French, Norwegian Nynorsk, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Top ten (20, 25, 100 etc) lists are a staple of publishing and the internet and some have assembled list of the “greatest” sopranos of all time but it’s really not possible to compare those who performed over centuries.  For those of the pre-electronic age, obviously no recordings exist and the only evidence of their stage performances is the subjective writings of critics and other contemporaries (of their divalike behavior the contemporary reports may be more reliable).  Even well into the twentieth century, the capabilities of the technology used to record sound and the dubious quality of the storage media means it’s difficult to compare and while “digital re-mastering” greatly enhances sound, it’s not entirely certain how closely the result emulates what originally would have been heard.  These difficulties exist in many fields.  In boxing it’s a challenge to creating rankings because those of one era never fought those in another and in sports where the equipment has such an influence (sun as golf and tennis), it can be hard to work out where technology ended and ability & application began.  Even the notions of “best” and greatest are contested.  In something like sprinting where everything comes down to a single metric (such as the elapsed time over 100 metres) perhaps it’s possible but is “the best” by definition the current holder of the world record, whomever held it longest or the runner who was judged to have run in the era with the most formidable competition.  There are nuances too.  In motorsport the question of “the greatest” is often debated and that’s clearly not about who is the fastest because in the 1970s few doubted that was Ronnie Peterson (1944–1978) but it’s rare to see him on lists because the sport is so focused on titles.  So it’s probably absurd to create a “greatest divas” list although some have and while there will always be variations, some names are likely always to appear:

Victoria de los Angeles (1923-2005): De los Angeles sang in an age of divas yet according to all reports she was the most un-diva-like of them all.  What made her a great singer was the sheer beauty of her voice, coupled with a delivery which seemed genuinely to affect her audience, one critic noting she didn’t so much master her repertoire as “seduce it”.  It was of course a technique to use a voice to evoke emotion in others and many singers do it but de los Angeles managed it with an innocence which made those listening forget the technical tricks of the trade and just feel.

Maria Callas (1923-1977): There is a cult surrounding Callas and even half a century-odd after her death, she remains probably the best known of all the divas. Even among those who have never heard he sing a note.  Her tempestuous private life accounts for much of that but she deserves the reputation she gained as a singer while at the height of her powers.  Both her training and technique were unconventional: Although never the most refined singer, she transcended that by brining to her roles a thrilling intensity and an untypical willingness to sound ugly if that’s what the role demanded; she was a great actress as well as a singer.  Where Callas sits in the pantheon will always be debated but she remains unique.

Kirsten Flagstad (1895-1962): There should probably be a special category for those who sing Richard Wagner’s (1813–1883) operas because as well as tonal beauty and a great memory, they need endurance and sheer power and in all this the Norwegian Flagstad set a mark not yet surpassed.  Even all that is really not enough to conquer the Wagnerian repertoire because a soprano needs also a sense of drama and several modes of attacking the declamatory utterances which make his work so memorable.  Hers was a dark voice which could range from the tenderness of the grieving maiden to the violence of Brünnhilde’s battle-cry and Wagner hasn’t been the same since.

Rosa Ponselle (1897-1981): US born of Italian stock, Ponselle performed mostly in the US along with several seasons in England and Italy.  She retired from stage work in the mid-1930s but to continued to sing into the 1950s and although the recordings of her are obviously pre-modern, they reveal enough for listeners to understand why her voice was so often described as “legendarily beautiful”.  That many critics can’t all be wrong.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (1915-2006): It may sound strange to speak of a soprano as “a technician” but it seems appropriate for Schwarzkopf who mastered such a range of styles and material; the word which appears time after time in the critical notices was “flawless”.  What should not be forgotten however were the innovations for she “invented” some of the ways sopranos “phrase” notes, techniques now part of the orthodoxy of performance.  Her 1965 performance of Richard Strauss's (1864-1949) Vier Letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) with the Radio-Symphonieorchester Berlin under György Széll (1897–1970) is definitive: the need again to record the songs vanished because it's simply not possible to improve on Schwarzkoph's recording.  She must have agreed with the critics because she choose seven of her own recordings when appearing on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs.

Renata Tebaldi (1922-2004): Tebaldi’s career began quite modestly in the last days of World War II (1939-1946 and in the early post-war years she confined herself almost exclusively to Italian works of the late nineteenth & early twentieth century but during the 1950s & 1960s she emerged was the leading Italian soprano.  By her own admission she was never a great “actress” and relied for effect on her voice but it alone was enough, critics describing it with terms like creamy or velvety, observing the way audiences would “bask” in its waves.