The Art of the Prima Donna was originally released in, I believe, 1961, as two separate LPs. I first heard it a few years later, and it was the first time I’d heard Joan Sutherland. I didn’t believe my ears–the bel canto revival was just beginning–and I’d never heard singing of such virtuosity. Here was what seemed like a very large voice–a sort of anti-Lily Pons and anti-Roberta Peters–tossing off roulades as if they were a natural mode of communication, taking what seemed to be hour-long lines in a single breath, racing up and down octaves without missing a note, and hurling high Ds and E flats about without losing tone or sounding puny, desperate, or crazy. I’d never heard any of I Puritani before, and Sutherland’s “Son vergin vezzosa” made me hysterical; by the time she sang “O rendetemi le speme…Qui la voce,” I felt that I had to know every note Bellini ever wrote. When she sang “The Soldier Tir’d” from Arne’s Artaxerxes my jaw dropped open–ocatve leaps, endless trills, whopping high notes. The Mad Scene from Hamlet made me want to hear the whole opera (which turned out to be a dud); Sutherland’s Bell Song made me realize that Lily Pons had actually become famous because she sounded like a bell and had a cute belly-button. The only problem I had was that the LPs distorted on high notes and at the end of sides: This problem, needless to say, is gone. Sutherland in person, it turned out, was just as great, with a voice larger than any singer in the world, except, perhaps, for Birgit Nilsson and Jon Vickers. Now Dame Joan is silent, but this set tells the truth: She was one of the 20th century’s greatest singers–perhaps one of the greatest ever. You must own this set.
