On Voice, Aging & the Prima Donna

Ancestral Wisdom from Opera’s Working Class Artists

My Bohemian ancestors want you to know that a woman’s voice is not considered at its fullness until her forties. Not in opera, which they made their living off in their time in Bohemia (now Czech Republic) and later in the States.

The prima donna, meaning “first woman” or the lead feminine role, were often in their 40s because one’s voice takes decades to develop. Decades of mastering breath techniques, vocal acrobatics, and lung capacity.

Decades of allowing the voice’s (the body’s) natural maturation processes to unfold.

That’s a bit of insight I like to take both literally and metaphorically: Our voices are late bloomers.

Since the prima donna’s reputation for viciousness and narcissism precedes her, it bears mentioning that she, like other opera performers, were primarily from the common, impoverished classes. A prima donna had to fight hard to have her talents acknowledged and compensated because of her class and her gender … I personally wonder if also because of her age.

From The Idea of Prima Donna: the History of a Very Special Opera’s Institution:

“Acting the prima donna’ may have been the only way to avoid exploitation, and a prima donna’s greed was often the hard-headed refusal to work for less than her market value … It would be possible to make a feminist defense of the prima donna. She proved that women of no inherited rank or moral virtue could stand up in public — something Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson never had to do — and make their lives for themselves.”

By operatic logic, Beyonce’s voice just crossed this past year into its era of grande fullness. Lady Gaga, Lizzo and Adele still have years to go, and the latest and greatest in pop talent in their teens and 20s have decades of developing their potentiality ahead of them.

Here’s to the slowness with which our fullness unfolds.