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[very-grownup]

Many great divas of the last thirty to forty years have been African Americans: Grace Bumbry, Martina Arroyo, Shirley Verrett, Leona Mitchell, Betty Allen, Mattiwilda Dobbs, Kathleen Battle, Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman. And yet, until recently, opera was a white enterprise. Most opera houses forbade women or men of color from singing or attending. Few blacks attended the Metropolitan Opera, even in the absence of strict segregation policies, and no blacks sang leading roles there until Marian Anderson made her postprime debut in 1955 as Ulrica the gypsy witch in Un Ballo in Maschera. Rosalyn M. Story's recent study, And So I Sing: African-American Divas of Opera and Concert, details a long history of African-American women achieving fame either through recital work or through operatic performances in all-black companies.

In Jean-Jacques Beineix's film Diva, the diva, Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, an American woman of color, subverts the traditional image of the white diva and reminds us that divas, though usually white, have been linked to racial otherness, darkness, exoticism, and "blood". Long before the recent flourishing of the African-American diva, opera culture used images of darkness to demonize the diva. Color is one of the primary metaphors for the qualities of vocal tone. Singers are taught to avoid the "white" sound and to cover the tones, to make them darker. Roles like Carmen rely on the notion of the diva's "Latin blood". When divas have been made up to appear Asian or African for such roles as Aida, Selika, Cio-Cio-San, and Iris, they were expressing opera culture's insistence on the dark nature of the diva, as well as underscoring, in a problematic masquerade, the white diva's separation from the women of color she portrays.

The voice of the black operatic or concert diva was imagined to emanate directly from her ethnicity: commentators referred to Marian Anderson's "Negroid sound." And listeners have used metaphors of darkness and of racial essence to describe the appeal of certain female operatic voices even when the singer was white. Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot were frequently described as having non-European features; one friend of Malibran speculated on the diva's "negro blood." A journalist, describing Adelina Patti as a child, notices her "little brown throat," her "Dark arms" clinging to her girl playmates' "white little necks"; because of her darkness, she is a "born exponent of the Spanish type." Italian origin was itself considered a sign of darkness: Margherita de L'Epine was called the "tawny Tuscan."

The diva brings her vocal treasure abroad, on tour to the colonies; and she finds there, among the colonized, a reflection of her abjected organ. Galli-Curci's biographer, narrating the diva's tour of Asia and Africa, alternates descriptions of her "native" audiences and accounts of her larynx's increasing vulnerability to medical specialists and to disease, as if the diva's voice, sent to tame and tranquilize the colonized, were itself the empire's possession, doomed to mysterious maladies and uncontrolled passions. Galli-Curci was like a missionary bent on conquering darkness; but her voice, because it was female, hidden, and inscrutable, was already aligned, in the imagery of empire, with the colonized.

- The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, Wayne Koestenbaum.

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