Word: donna
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...Prima Donna...
...upper register. But in the low and middle registers she sang with flutelike purity, tender and yet sharply disciplined, and in the upper reaches-shrill or not-she flashed a swordlike power that is already legend. In one of the repertory's most strenuous roles-Prima Donna Lilli Lehmann called Norma tougher than all three Briinnhildes-the Callas voice rose from her slender frame with dazzling endurance. No doubt, other great operatic sopranos can coax out of their ample, placid figures tones that esthetes call more beautiful. But just as the greatest beauties among women do not usually have...
...teamwork is the cry. Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera even forbids solo curtain calls. At home the opera star is often no more glamorous than a suburban housewife. In an age of small-scale talent and matching egos, the one diva who truly deserves the proud title of prima donna, with all its overtones of good and evil, is Maria Meneghini Callas...
After her success at La Scala, Callas began to lose weight. In three years she dropped from 202 Ibs. to a sleek 135 Ibs. "She got what she wanted, so she stopped overeating," explained an interested doctor. In Milan she began to live the life of the prima donna and to look the part. Milan fondly encouraged her, wined and dined her whenever possible. Her life took on a sybaritic pattern. In the morning she usually sang at the piano on a glassed-in terrace outside her bedroom, polishing current roles. Afternoons, she visited her dressmaker or her beautician, taking...
...world laboring under the impression that a prima donna must be corpulent to be operatic, Callas' sensational slimming has caused much shaking of heads and predictions of vocal perdition. But the newly glamorous Maria, thin, relaxed and even daring to taste the pleasures of the idle rich (she sang all night in a Vienna cafe last summer, for sheer pleasure), has lost not a decibel of power, a note of range, a mote of sweetness...