Diva Manquee: Peter G. Davis remembers the magic of "prima-tive donna" Eleanor Steber.

America has produced its fair share of opera divas over the past 200 years, and Eleanor Steber belongs in their number. She was the leading lyric soprano of her generation, and, during her heyday in the 1940s and '50s, her career was an important one at the Metropolitan Opera, on radio and recordings, and later on television. She was a singer who possessed a rare combination of vocal radiance, technical mastery and personal charisma, and during her best years, the distinctive purity, spinning tone and easy sweetness of her soprano made her the Mozart-Strauss soprano of one's dreams.

She even led the sort of colorful life one expects of a diva, including vocal crises, two stormy marriages, temper tantrums with colleagues, disputes with powerful impresarios, overindulgence in life's little pleasures and enthusiastic rejoicing in the outsized personality that helped make her such a special singer. Even her recitals seemed larger than life, especially the famous evening in Carnegie Hall on October 10, 1958, when she sang three demanding Mozart arias, Berlioz's Les Nuits d'Ete, the mad scene from I Puritani, the Empress's dream sequence from Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915 and four big opera arias as encores.

Yet the diva label just doesn't seem to suit Steber. Indeed, none of her American colleagues during those years were perceived as real, honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned divas, and I've often wondered why. They certainly lacked the grand manner and exotic flavor of the passionately worshipped European deities of the day, but the fact that they were Americans doesn't wholly explain why they seemed so down-home. Such imposing native singers as Farrar, Garden, Nordica and Fremstad managed to create the elusive diva aura more successfully than Helen Traubel, Dorothy Kirsten, Rise Stevens, Astrid Varnay and Blanche Thebom--all prominent American singers active in Steber's time. Even if circumstances prevented these estimable ladies from recording as prolifically as their predecessors or the generation that followed them, more than enough evidence exists on disc to determine that their voices were in every way comparable to the best the world had to offer, even if opinions still differ on their ultimate position in the vocal hierarchy.

As much as I loved Steber's voice and artistry back then, I sensed at an early age that she was not cut out to play the diva's role. As an opera-mad teenager and autograph hound, I first met the soprano at the stage door of the old Boston Opera House, after she had just completed a matinee performance as Fiordiligi in Cosi Fan Tutte. Always happy to be back in the city where she had studied voice and launched her career, Steber had been in rare form that afternoon, and she knew it. She grabbed my program, eagerly signed it and asked me all sorts of questions about my music studies. "Have you got Frankie's autograph yet?" she suddenly erupted as baritone Frank Guarrera passed by. "Hey, Frankie! Come over here!" she called out, then noticed the book I carried under ...