Today, the term ‘diva’ is a long way removed from its glowing origins
To mark the 100th anniversary of Maria Callas’s birth – much celebrated elsewhere in this issue – let’s talk about a word that, in her day, was still used as an accolade for women performers, especially opera singers, at the very top of their profession. Whereas today it has become an all-purpose term of abuse applied to just about anybody who exhibits haughty behaviour.
The word is ‘diva’. It means goddess in Latin. And until our own era it meant goddess in showbiz too. In fact, Callas’s fans nicknamed her ‘La Divina’, the divine – the ultimate diva. It implied not just incredible talent but something perhaps even more powerful: a charismatic force that reached out and touched the hearts of millions.
How to explain that? In his fascinating book Charisma in Politics, Religion and the Media, the theology professor David Aberbach suggests that the public figures with the greatest mass appeal are likely to be individuals damaged by unstable or unpleasant childhoods and by their subsequent struggles to find happiness. He argues that their fractured lives make them irresistible to millions of followers who have troubled lives of their own.
That was certainly true of Callas, who was exploited, abused and discarded by just about everyone who got close to her – from her own mother to the ghastly Aristotle Onassis. But it’s also true of numerous other showbiz divas from her era. Think of Billie Holiday, Édith Piaf, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland. All had deep emotional scars, and their fans loved them for it.
As the 20th century moved on, however, the description ‘diva’ came to signal another, less sympathetic character trait. A charitable description might be ‘uncompromising attitude’. Uncharitably, the word diva now evoked arrogance, high-handedness, rudeness or even megalomania.
Psychologically, it’s easy to see how the first trait led to the second. The diva compensates for all the bad things that have happened to her by inflicting dictatorial behaviour on those around her. Demands that seem completely unreasonable to other people seem perfectly logical, in fact necessary, in her mind. Or as Callas once snapped: ‘Don’t talk to me about rules, dear. I make the goddam rules.’
Those demands can often be ludicrous. Kathleen Battle, the soprano famously fired by the Metropolitan Opera in New York for subjecting every other member of the cast to what was described as ‘withering criticisms’, on
