Hasmik Papian's final performance of the title role in Bellini's "Norma" this afternoon, in the Baltimore Opera's current production at the Lyric, is sure to produce pan-demonium. There will be clapping, there will be cheers, and there will even be - perhaps especially from the men in the audience - tears.
The young Armenian soprano will provoke this admiration, rapture and identification not simply because she is a remarkable singer and musician, but because she is much more: She is a diva.
The word - Italian for goddess - means more than just a famous female opera singer. Papian, in fact, is not yet famous, though she undoubtedly will become so. And there are great sopranos - Victoria de los Angeles was one of them - who are not divas. The word implies a singer who can, with an inexplicable combination of voice, artistry and presence, embody the spirit of opera and drive audiences wild.
Sopranos have a peculiar power to engage us that is unmatched by instrumentalists and even (except perhaps for tenors) by other singers. The pianist, violinist and cellist all practice a skill with which the nonmusician cannot identify. But almost all of us - whether in the shower or in the automobile, whether we are listening to Giuseppe Verdi or the Beatles - are secret singers. Thus it is easier to identify with the singer than with any other musician. And it is the celebrated women that we call divas who affect us the most powerfully.
Women are central to opera. Despite the popular success enjoyed by a Caruso or a Pavarotti, divo - Italian for god - is never used for male singers. It is the women who are divine, and men much less frequently receive the adulation that women enjoy in the opera house. It's the women who inspire fans to cross the country to hear a favorite singer in a role or line up for successive evenings in the cold for standing room.
The kiss of death
Operas are songs of love and death that tend to concentrate on the heartbreak, sufferings and exquisite deaths of women. Statistical studies of representative operas from 1752 to the present show that there are three deaths of a heroine for every death of a hero. This has been particularly so since the beginning of the 19th century, when romanticism began to place the perfumed kiss of death on operatic stories - the very time, incidentally, that the word diva first entered popular use.
But even in its beginning at the end of the 16th century in northern Italy, opera - an experiment in form that tried to resurrect ancient Greek tragedy - was concerned with death and with woman. This is true of almost all the earlyoperas, including the first masterpiece, Monteverdi's "Orfeo," about the death of Eurydice, the attempt of Orpheus to reclaim her from the afterlife and his final loss of her to that dark dominion.
But as central as woman is to opera, man is just as important to the audience.
Opera is created primarily by men, and, as a business, it's run primarily by them for audiences in which men usually constitute the most overtly enthusiastic part. At any performance, they're usually the ones doing most of the shouting, and they're also the ones who amass the huge opera record collections. Not the least important reason is that the opera house is one of the few places in which a man can cry with impunity.
The diva crystallizes many of the ambivalent attitudes men have about women: She is imperious, capricious and authoritative (the all-powerful mother); she is an icy princess (the unattainable love object); and she's vulnerable, loving and willing to sacrifice all for love (every woman who's ever been jilted). She is these things on stage, and she may also be them in her personal life - which explains why Maria Callas, whose personal affairs were as operatic as that of any heroine she ever portrayed, was at once the most celebrated, worshiped and reviled diva of this century.
Opera is about ecstasy. It is an ecstasy for which women are largely responsible, and adoration of a diva can turn quickly to hatred. When Callas failed, as she increasingly did after 1958, she incurred insults and vilification.
Curiously, however, those who continued to worship her loved her even more in her downfall than in her triumph. Great divas like Joan Sutherland and Leontyne Price enjoyed great careers that concluded gracefully, but they never had quite the pull of a fallen type such as Callas, though her great period lasted less than 10 years. The Callas cult is something like the Judy Garland cult; it is based on the rise and fall of a great talent, whose final immolation in self-destruction seems to be one of the central passions of our time.
Physics and passion
The only male voice that offers anything like the emotional catharsis of the soprano's is the tenor's, largely because their roles are typically that of hero and heroine.
But it also has something to do with physics. One of the principal properties of high-pitched singing is that it makes intelligible verbal articulation impossible. Vowel sounds become indistinguishable above 660 hertz or high E. This means that the high voices deal almost entirely with pure emotion, leaving rational discourse behind.
A singer is more likely to be understood when the greatest part of his or her range falls within the zone of maximal intelligibility, which is below 312 hertz. That a basso is easier to understand than a soprano should not surprise, because his entire range is within this zone, while only one-fourth of the soprano's (and only one-fifth of her higher-pitched sister's, the coloratura) falls within it.
When opera's denigrators poke fun at the genre - "How can you enjoy what you don't understand?" - they miss the point. By the time a tenor or soprano reaches his or her stratospheric heights - "E lucevan le stelle," in which the tenor in "Tosca," about to die, realizes that he has never loved so much, or "Sono andati" in "Boheme," in which the soprano, as she is about to die, tells the tenor that her love is "as huge as the sea" - we know what they are singing about.
Because the emotions are so enormous and extravagant, the essence of what we mean when we call something "operatic," the words don't matter. Intelligible words would, in fact, be a hindrance; intelligibility, which is objective, restricts emotionality, which is purely subjective. At opera's extreme moments, the high-pitched voices leave language behind to become pure music, taking the listener on an ecstatic voyage of identification with the singer.
This is why the size of opera singers - another butt of popular jokes - doesn't matter. When singing begins to leave language behind, it also leaves the body behind. The incongruity between the singer's appearance and her role dissolves. Jessye Norman, for example, is a huge woman. But when she sings Sieglinde in Wagner's "Walkuere," she can make an ardent Siegfried out of any man who isn't deaf.
That it is sopranos even more than tenors who produce such effects has a lot to do with both gender and dramatic roles. The role of gender is this: The performance of the diva - whether of Bellini's Norma, Mozart's Donna Elvira or Wagner's Isolde - gives a man a chance to experience what it feels like to be "the other."
The emotional life of men is such that, probably because of repression, they rarely get an opportunity to explore the interior life of a woman. At the opera, safely ensconced in a darkened theater, they can. And the roles themselves - given that the singer has the necessary personality, artistry, voice and presence - are more majestic and emotionally searing than almost anything written for the men.
Richard Wagner said that "music is a woman"; about opera, he was almost certainly correct. It is a diva's roles - whether formidable, vulnerable or, frequently, both - that most indulge the yearning for ecstasy that opera is celebrated for satisfying. In the deaths of Violetta, Isolde or Norma, the loss of life and love is
evoked in music that forces us to experience what it is like to be loved and what it means to lose it.
Divas, more gloriously than other performers, sing of love and death. They are goddesses because they immortalize and transcend what is so intensely human. We worship them because they permit us to grieve with them, never allowing us to forget that we are mourning for ourselves.
Pub Date: 11/22/98