diva

Diva comes from Italian diva, the feminine form of the adjective divo (divine, godlike), from Latin divus (divine, of divine nature) — related to deus (god) and to the Proto-Indo-European root *dyew- (sky, heaven, the shining), which also gives English divine, deity, Jupiter (Juppiter, father of the sky), and Zeus. The Latin divus was used for deified emperors and for divine figures generally; the Italian diva applied the same elevation to the great sopranos and mezzos of nineteenth-century opera — figures like Giuditta Pasta, Maria Malibran, Adelina Patti, and later Maria Callas — whose voices were thought to reach beyond ordinary human capacity into something properly described as divine. To call a singer a diva was not a casual compliment but a theological claim about the nature of great vocal art: that it partakes of something not fully explicable by training and anatomy.

The culture of the nineteenth-century operatic diva was elaborate, expensive, and carefully managed. Adelina Patti (1843–1919) — soprano, box-office phenomenon, and perhaps the most famous singer of her era — traveled with a private rail car, negotiated her fees in cash before each performance (her contracts famously required payment in gold), and exercised contractual control over her repertoire, her billing, and the conditions of her performances that no manager or composer could override. The diva's exceptional demands were understood as legitimate expressions of an exceptional position: the person whose voice sold every ticket in a house of 3,000 people for thirty consecutive nights had earned the right to make exceptional demands. The diva system was the operatic equivalent of the star system that Hollywood would develop fifty years later, with the same mixture of genuine talent, constructed mythology, and commercial exploitation.

Maria Callas (1923–1977) is the figure who most completely defined the twentieth-century meaning of diva — both in its elevated and its pejorative senses. Her voice was technically imperfect by the standards of pure bel canto beauty: it had registers that did not always blend, a slight wobble in the middle range that intensified with age, and a timbre that some found thrilling and others found uncomfortable. What she brought was an intensity of dramatic and musical intelligence that transformed operatic performance, restoring the expressive priorities of early Verdi and early Bellini that had been covered over by decades of purely vocal display. She was also, by all accounts, genuinely difficult: temperamental, demanding, capable of walking out of performances and canceling without notice, involved in public conflicts with the managements of La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera. The combination of transformative artistry and exhausting personality established the template for the word's later usage.

The word diva left the opera house sometime in the late twentieth century and entered general usage as the name for anyone — in any field, of any gender — whose talent is accompanied by exceptional self-regard and exceptional demands on those around them. In this usage the divine has evaporated and the demanding remains: a 'diva' is someone difficult to work with, requiring special treatment, prone to displays of temperament. The word's journey from Latin divus (divine) to Patti's gold-paid contracts to Callas's walkouts to the contemporary general pejorative traces a long arc of secularization: the goddess who once sang beyond ordinary human capacity has become, in the word's diluted modern usage, simply the difficult colleague.