prima donna

Prima donna is Italian for 'first lady' — prima (first, feminine form of primo, from Latin primus, first) and donna (lady, woman, from Latin domina, mistress, lady). In operatic terminology, the prima donna was the leading female singer in an opera company — specifically the soprano who performed the principal female role in the most important operas of a season. The term first appears in Italian operatic records in the seventeenth century and was in common use by the early eighteenth century, when Italian opera had become the dominant art form of European courts and cities from London to St. Petersburg.

The historical prima donna held a position of enormous power within the opera company. She was typically the highest-paid performer, the one whose engagement determined what operas would be staged, and the one whose preferences shaped the casting, the repertoire, and sometimes the composition itself. Composers of the Baroque and Classical eras routinely wrote roles to suit specific singers — tailoring arias to showcase a particular voice's strengths and avoid its weaknesses. Handel composed roles in his London operas specifically for his prima donnas: Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, two rival sopranos who performed in his company in the 1720s, inspired arias written to exploit the distinctive qualities of each voice. The rivalry between them became so intense that it culminated in a famous on-stage brawl during a performance of Giovanni Bononcini's Astianatte in 1727 — a public spectacle that became the talk of London.

The prima donna's power over composers and managers was not accidental but structural. Italian opera in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was organized around the star system: audiences attended to hear specific singers, not specific operas, and a company that did not engage the season's most celebrated prima donna would suffer at the box office. The convention of the aria da capo, in which a singer was expected to improvise ornamental elaborations on the repetition of the opening section, gave the prima donna an opportunity to display her vocal individuality every time she performed — which meant that a poor prima donna could not hide, and a great one could turn every performance into a different event.

By the nineteenth century, as the bel canto repertoire — Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti — made even greater vocal demands, and as the soprano Maria Malibran, Giulia Grisi, and then Adelina Patti became internationally famous figures, the prima donna had become a phenomenon beyond the opera house. Her behavior, her demands, her relationships, and her fees were discussed in newspapers across Europe. The stereotype of the prima donna — temperamental, impossibly demanding, convinced of her own indispensability — began to form in this period. By the early twentieth century, prima donna had entered English general usage to describe any person, regardless of profession or gender, who behaves as if they are the indispensable center of any enterprise.