A 1987 Maria Callas collection called "The Unknown Recordings" is one of the few opera records in my collection. I like it fine. She sings Wagner, Verdi and Rossini. But I only ever listen to the album if I'm chopping up pesto or something. Because I didn't buy it for the music -- I bought "The Unknown Recordings" because of the black-and-white photograph of Callas on its cover. She wears a black dress before a white background. She stands like a column. Her chin is raised slightly, her eyebrows dramatically penciled black. And I don't know if it's the way her hair is coiffed into a perfect black flip or if it's the defiance in her eyes, but Callas resembles no one so much as Anne Bancroft in "The Graduate." Maria Callas is Mrs. Robinson dressed up for a night out, which is to say that she is a little menacing and a lot glamorous. She's a star and she knows it.

Nineteenth century audiences needed opera singers the way the 20th century masses crave movie stars and rock stars. We need inspiration, beauty, fun. We need an otherworldly face (or voice or dress or hairstyle) to stand in the this-worldly doorway like Mrs. Robinson and make us nervous, make us hot. And it is that desire -- and not a devotion to operatic history -- that makes reading Peter Davis' "The American Opera Singer: The Lives and Adventures of America's Great Singers in Opera and Concert, From 1825 to the Present" (Doubleday) such a pleasure. If anything, reading the stories of Jenny Lind and Clara Louise Kellogg and the rest make you feel a little less sorry for your fellow citizens of the last century: Poor dears never got Aretha, but at least they had someone to swoon over. And long before Elvis Presley, there was recording phenomenon Enrico Caruso, and "virtually all America heard him, and the country adored every note."

Even though they toiled in a painfully European genre, Davis' artists are the first American stars. It is the beginning of our addiction, and what is the need for celebrity but the need for the singular, for the new? "Each promising new generation of singers," he writes, "is invariably hailed as an unprecedented phenomenon."

As a pop fan, I tend to tune out the old debates surrounding the classical repertoire. It didn't dawn on me that not so long ago a category like "the American opera singer" would have been waved away as an oxymoron in the way that "French rock 'n' roller" is today: Yeah, right. Thanks to the Metropolitan, the United States has turned into the genre's premier venue, but that hasn't meant that any meaningful operatic tradition has taken root here. The history of American opera is never going to be a completely satisfying American story. It's rather depressing that just at the moment when half of Europe dreamed of escaping to the New World, American singers had to cross the pond the other way to learn their craft. There's far too much transatlantic travel going on here for my taste.

Still, one of the curious delights of Davis' story is the worship of all things Italian. Just as Italian immigrants were being made to Americanize their names to fit in, American opera singers were Italianizing their names to be taken seriously. Davis points out, "When a singer was appearing in Italy, it facilitated pronunciation for the natives, and back home it gave a singer the necessary aura of Continental glamour, even if everyone knew that Signore Giovanni Chiari di Broccolini was really John Clarke" -- from Brooklyn. I like the way music turns the tables like that -- the way rockabilly made it hip to be from Tennessee, and rap made Compton chic.

I can't help but read the biographies of these opera singers without picturing their bodies in the shape of my rock 'n' roll heroes. There's Olive Fremstad from Minnesota, a kind of Bob Dylan-meets-Jerry Lee Lewis, who goes to the morgue to hold a severed head so she'll be able to play Salome more convincingly, and who builds on her past as a preacher's daughter, tossing off one-liners like, "I consider the whole opera 'Parsifal' to be just a big elaborate revival meeting." Or you can turn Lillian Nordica into a Tina Turner -- a "celebrity who looked and acted like one" who at the same time had very bad taste in husbands. And since you can't encourage ambition and self-confidence without inspiring a few selfish brats who, thanks to opera, get to be called "divas," the Lou Reed Award for atrocious behavior goes to soprano Kathleen Battle. Davis' most delicious anecdote goes: "Riding in her chauffeured limousine, [Battle] purportedly rang up her New York management via cellular phone and demanded that someone from the home office call the driver on his cellular phone and tell him to slow down." And they say rock stars have no manners ...

Many of the singers Davis discusses -- most, actually -- are women. This is because women had fewer options and therefore more at stake than men in pursuing musical careers. Of 19th century American man, Davis writes, "Singing for a living would probably have struck him as unmanly, if not downright pointless, considering the innumerable opportunities for making fortunes." But becoming an opera singer or an actress was one of the few options for ambitious American girls to get their hands on fame and fortune. That hasn't changed; becoming a star is still a good idea for women with dollar signs in their eyes. Forget the cover of Rolling Stone -- just ask Madonna, who knows that it's a different thrill entirely to grace the cover of Forbes.

So you read this 600-page ode to mostly female perseverance and success. And you cheer a little, until a kind of irony seizes you. Namely, that these pre-feminist overachievers grabbed fame and fortune by playing operatic heroines. And I don't know that much about opera, but don't all the women, like, die? That's why the first record I wanted to hear when I finished reading "The American Opera Singer" wasn't my Maria Callas-as-Mrs. Robinson album. It was the song "Rock Opera" by San Francisco girl punks Cypher in the Snow. In funny, operatic hysterics, vocalist Juliana Snapper lists the roles that made Callas and Fremstad rich and famous: Carmen, Tosca, Isolde, etc. Their fate? "Consumption, syphilis, heartbroken, gout, frostbite and dementia." That's entertainment!
SALON | Jan. 23, 1998