The Third Leader: Temper, temper
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Your support makes all the difference.Operatic behaviour, we note, from il divo and la diva, Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu: stage stormed off, roles suddenly surrendered, boycotts threatened. We say: Bravo!
For whether or not you like the thrilling, heartbreaking preposterousness of the great form, you surely can't expect its practitioners to come and go quietly. Anyway, on past form, Alagna and Gheorghiu are fairly low-key. Alagna reacted to booing at La Scala by leaving abruptly for his dressing room; when it happened to the great Corelli, he left the stage, sprinted three flights of stairs and hurled himself on the booer.
When a stagehand in the wings made a personal remark, frame-wise, to La Callas, she ripped off his shirt and punched him on the nose. Art requires an imperious, impervious and industrial self-obsession. This is Arditi, finally placing Shakespeare: "Ah, you mean the librettist." When playing Desdemona, Melba would rise from her deathbed for an encore before allowing Otello to get on with it.
And besides, as nursery rhymes show, bad behaviour can be as instructive as good. Indeed, you might argue that there's a harmful shortage of it from today's public figures, constrained as they are by positive role modelling and other correctnesses. Think how many Pete Doherty must have saved.
Naomi Campbell, too, would do well to study the style of the incomparable, and magnificently demanding, Diana Ross, who contrived a telling summary with her usual felicity: "Just because I have my standards, they think I'm a bitch!"
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