Prima donnas? What prima donnas?(Coda)

At the Metropolitan Opera, in the early 1960s, when I served as Rudolf Bing's private secretary for a time, there were a lot of great sopranos--but not so many prima donnas. The most temperamental one of that era was Maria Callas. Her legendary temperament came to me via the Met files and secondhand gossip, because Mr. Bing had fired her just before I started working in his office.

It wasn't easy dealing with a prima donna whose husband kept getting in the way. In those few weeks in 1959, before it became definite that Callas wouldn't return to the Met to sing Lady Macbeth, Bing tried to telephone her in Dallas. She knew he didn't speak Italian, and she also knew that her husband, Meneghini, didn't speak English. So instead of answering Bing's calls herself, she would put Meneghini on the line, and the two men would scream at each other in various languages, then slam down the phones in unison in furious frustration.

Callas may have known that Bing hated handwritten letters, yet she wrote to him routinely in red ink on endless pages of white tissue paper, letters he would crumple up and throw on the floor, shouting, "Somebody read this mess and type it so a human being can read it!"

Bing relished recounting Callas's payment requirements. She wanted her fees in cash, in small denominations, before the end of every performance, so Bing described how he would stagger into her dressing room at intermission carrying a huge box of fives and ones and wait irritably as she and her husband counted them.

Renata Tebaldi displayed a different kind of temperament. When she didn't like the way repertoire discussions were going, she would simply keep silent in Italy and not answer letters or phone calls. Met employees were sent over in droves to try to reason with her, but she remained impervious to entreaties. At one point, in an executive-committee meeting, it was agreed that an urgent cable should once again be sent to her. Assistant manager John Gutman, the staff linguist, was told to translate into Italian whatever Bing wanted to say in the cablegram. Bing thought for a moment, then said, "Bloody bitch, answer!" Gutman, registering no particular emotion, translated quietly, "Cagna di sangue, risponda." (As I recall, it was decided to change the wording.)

But there were plenty of other great artists who were not prima donnas. One was Eileen Farrell, who had a magnificent voice but didn't carry on about it. Once, during a rehearsal, Farrell grabbed at her string of pearls as she hit a high note. The string broke, ...