Hurricane Gina.(opera singer Genevieve Cigna)

The formidable Gina Cigna Italy's preeminent 1930s Gioconda, Norma and Turandot, is approaching her one-hundred-first birthday this winter at home in Milan, scene of her greatest triumphs. Operaphiles of sense and sensibility acknowledge a longstanding ambivalence toward the soprano's fascinatingly idiosyncratic art. With her grandiloquent, supercharged performances, Cigna is not likely to have soothed any savage breasts; indeed, she may have incited them to yet greater ferocity. Her stamina, her almost unbearably driven intensity of expression and the sheer decibel output at the top of her range were uncommon attributes, even in the heroic operatic age she inhabited.

"She was like a gale-force wind!" declared Frederick Jagel, Cigna's Cavalleria partner during her brief Met tenure (1936-38). "And not just her voice!" he further informed me. "If she latched onto you, you had to be rooted to the stage, because she would either pull or shove you right off your feet if you weren't in complete balance. Remember the place where Turiddu is supposed to throw Santuzza to the ground? I was afraid she would throw me down!"

Paris-born Genevieve Cigna was half French and half Italian but all diva. Seven years' study with the legendary Emma Calve, whose tutelage concentrated on "yogi breathing," did not circumscribe the pupil's hyperdramatic disposition or goals. She willed herself into the soprano range one excruciating half-step at a time. "I did not wish to be a mezzo," she said with finality. "To Italy!" decreed Calve at last, blessing her protegee's proclivities.

Already twenty-seven, Cigna began at the pinnacle, acing an audition at La Scala and making her initial appearance on any stage -- as Ginette Sens, combining her French sobriquet with her first husband's surname -- singing Freia in an Italian Rheingold there. During her two-season novitiate she performed regularly under an approving Arturo Toscanini's baton. "Gina Cigna" emerged on December 19, 1929, as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni. Thereafter, stage persona and primadonna status secure, she accumulated a remarkable repertory and visited all the major Italian houses, plus Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Vienna, London (four Covent Garden engagements), Rio, Sao Paulo, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Augmenting familiar fare (Aida, Ballo, Traviata, Chenier), novelties included two world premieres (Respighi's La Fiamma, Rome, 1934, and Panizza's Bizancio, Buenos Aires, 1939), several Italian "firsts" (Kostelnicka in Jenufa, Venice, 1941, and Strauss's Daphne, Milan, 1942), two Gomes operas in the composer's native Brazil, Oberon, Alceste, Tsar Saltan and a dozen Italian rarities, from Monteverdi to Montemezzi.

When a bus carrying Cigna to perform Tosca at Vicenza (September 24, 1947) overturned, she sustained a severe blow to the ribs from a tumbling fellow passenger. Pain be damned, she continued to the theater and sang. Somewhere between the accident and Tosca's suicide leap (accounts vary), she suffered a "silent" heart attack. Complications from the undetected infarction ensued, ending her stage life if hardly shortening the real one. She devoted the next thirty-odd years to teaching, first in Milan, later in Toronto (1951-57), Genoa and Siena.

Licia Albanese, frequently Cigna's Lib in the '30s, remembers that "Mme. Cigna was beautiful on the stage, statuesque, a wonderful actress. She looked absolutely how Turandot should look. She was very popular with the public and she was a very good colleague, no jealousy -- she helped the young singer, she didn't put up barriers as many others did." Albanese rejects the received wisdom regarding Cigna's voice: "For me, she was never a dramatic soprano. She was a pure lirico spinto. It's only that conductors back then knew how to keep the orchestra down, so her voice became `big.' Ponselle, Milanov, Caniglia, Giannini, those were dramatic sopranos."

Cigna's preserved live performances -- a Met Aida and Norma, a ...