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Updated: June 18, 2025
There's something even in those names which is pleasant to write down; to have passed only two hours in Cadiz is something to have seen real donnas with comb and mantle real caballeros with cloak and cigar real Spanish barbers lathering out of brass basins and to have heard guitars under the balconies: there was one that an old beggar was jangling in the market, whilst a huge leering fellow in bushy whiskers and a faded velvet dress came singing and jumping after our party, not singing to a guitar, it is true, but imitating one capitally with his voice, and cracking his fingers by way of castanets, and performing a dance such as Figaro or Lablache might envy.
There were one or two ambitious orchestra conductors in America; one in Chicago trying to introduce the Wagnerian polyphonic school, and perhaps one or two in New York; but the public clamoured after divas, prima donnas and tenors with temperaments and vocal pyrotechnic skill. For orchestral music there was little demand.
It takes more than a little smouldering fire to route this pest of the marshlands and it is doubtful whether all the smoke from the forest fire, whose devastation had just been witnessed, could have sufficed to drive these fine sopranoed prima donnas of the marsh away.
He made them appear as old coquettes, prima donnas of the orchestra, gipsies, and rope-dancers. The virtuosi naturally provided him with splendid material. He declared himself incompetent when he had to criticise their conjuring performances.
The cross here preceded the sword. No blood stains the Easter lilies of the sacrifice. The Dons and Donnas greet each other in stately fashion, as the gathering disperses. Governor Alvarado gives a feast to the notables. The old families are all represented at the board.
With the most extravagant irony he described to me what a strange life of worry and torture Angela led him as soon as she became his wife. Krespel was of opinion that more capriciousness and waywardness were concentrated in Angela's little person than in all the rest of the prima donnas in the world put together.
Then, there is another flock, a flock of girls, victims of the Chimera, walking with a nimble, a prancing step, with music scores under their arms, on the way to the maestro's; slender, light-haired English misses, who want to become prima donnas of comic opera; fair-skinned, buxom Russian parishnas who greet their acquaintances with the sweeping bow of a dramatic soprano; Spanish señoritas of bold faces and free manners, preparing for stage careers as Bizet's cigarette-girl frivolous, sonorous song-birds nesting hundreds of leagues away, and who have flown hither dazzled by the tinsel of glory.
Some months later she sent a story to the Boston Saturday Gazette, entitled The Rival Prima Donnas, and, to her great delight, received ten dollars; and what was almost better still, a request from the editor for another story. Miss Alcott made the Rival Prima Donnas into a drama, and it was accepted by a theatre, and would have been put upon the stage but for some disagreement among the actors.
It was not only quick and animated songs that were thus overloaded with meaningless embroideries by the sopranists and the prima donnas that followed them. Slow movements, which ought to breathe a spirit of melancholy, appear to have been especially selected as background for these vocal fireworks. I need not dwell on the unnaturalness of this style.
Help the Red Cross buy Doughnuts for the Salvation Army and keep an eye on Your Austrian Janitor.... Elephants, tom-cats, and chorus-girls; a hallelujah with a red putty nose, Seventy-six Thousand Press Agents Walking on their Hands, Jabberwocks, Horned Toads, and Prima Donnas ... here comes the Liberty Loan Drive ... A mighty nation had gone to war. Boom! Boom!
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