“Be careful when you say ‘ghetto’… music comes from there,” she told French journalist Philippe Caloni in her final interview (1977). “I’ve almost never seen a great musician who had an upper-class background. There’s something good about ghettos because if you come from there, it makes you want more. It makes you say, ‘One day I’ll be someone’.” In a world where women are routinely placed into categories, often with negative connotations, like ‘whore’, ‘virgin’, ‘slut’, ‘hormonal, ‘hysterical’, etc, ‘diva’ is just another example that only serves to lazily reduce a woman to nothing more than a mere concept of a person.
Certainly, when men work hard – even if that means neglecting their families or lashing out at crew members for not understanding their creative visions, for example – they rarely get criticised in the same way. For a female star to lean into ‘hustle culture’ and creative perfection is to become selfish, arrogant, over-confident, and a diva. The posthumous veneration of Callas might deflect from the media industry’s original malice, but it also reflects her inimitable force. There is only one Callas, yet there are seemingly countless incarnations; as listeners, we project our personal desires, and distresses, onto her expressions – and we continue to bond with her music, in unpredictable ways. Tom Volf, the director of acclaimed documentary Maria by Callas (2017), has described first discovering Callas (in the “mad scene” from Gaetano Donizetti’s 1835 opera Lucia di Lammermoor) on YouTube in the early hours; “The only thing I could Diva see or feel was something incredible, indescribable, passing through me when I was listening to her,” Volf told NPR. Callas maintained her poise in the face of astounding cruelty, and long before mainstream notions of artist wellbeing or body positivity; it’s hard to imagine people camping out for Beyoncé or Gaga shows solely to jeer or pelt the stars with vegetables.
Lizzo’s promotion of body positivity is just one example of how dedicated divas have used their platform for good. The trope of the demanding, drama-loving diva is everywhere throughout the history of stage, screen, music and more. But a new exhibition celebrates the diva for what she really is – fabulous, writes Deborah Nicholls-Lee.
Derided in her youth for being fat, Callas was later slated for being too thin; her weight loss was said to contribute to her vocal decline, although the intensity and range of her work was surely a factor. A new documentary explores the highs and lows of Callas’s life, as well as what her legacy is today. “She worked so hard, she made herself Maria Callas – she made herself the greatest diva,” Stella Kourmapana, archivist at the Athens Conservatoire, explains in Maria Callas, part of the BBC series Take Me to The Opera.
By using a term that reduces a person to a flimsy stereotype, you strip a person of their identity and complexity. Considering that much of what we know about celebrities has been constructed through the media, we can never be sure of what a person is really like unless we know them personally. In Beyoncé’s song ‘Diva’, she tells us that a “diva is a female version of a hustler”.
DIVA brings you the latest in lesbian and bi related celebrity interviews, news, politics, pop culture, style, travel, social issues, entertainment and more. First published in 1994, DIVA is the world’s best-selling magazine for LGBTQIA women, spotlighting all that is fresh, funny, exciting, controversial and cutting-edge in our community. The role leading the renovated Jersey Opera House is advertised with a salary of up to £90,000.
She was also beamed to prime-time TV audiences, such as her 1956 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show,where she sang Vissi d’arte (I lived for art), an aria from Giacomo Puccini’s 1899 opera Tosca. The image of Callas as an archetypal diva, and the notion that the goddess-star should suffer for her art, is loaded; there is no equivalent that positions a male divo on quite the same pedestal, or exposes them to the same judgements. Yet Callas did arguably channel real-life trauma and conflict into her musical delivery, and seemed bound by the notion of “destiny”.
We travel to La Scala in Milan, Italy the iconic stage where every opera singer dreams of performing. Exploring the definition of diva-dom is the exhibition DIVA, just opened at the V&A, London. “The exhibition will show that there are many definitions and interpretations of a diva,” lead curator Kate Bailey tells BBC Culture. But there’ll be no tabloid-style slating of Mariah Carey for allegedly demanding kittens and confetti at a Christmas lights launch, or of Jennifer Lopez for asking (UK TV show) Top of The Pops to redecorate her dressing room. At what point are people jumping to use the term diva in place of ‘a woman with boundaries’? Old Hollywood icons like Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe have been dubbed ‘divas’, but this term fails to harness any nuance.
by admin on Wed 17th January 2024