Coloratura donnas
In the previous post, your host had thought he was coining a sardonic reference to an egotistical singer by terming him a "coloratura bass". Afterwards, SC decided to have a look around and see if anyone else had done similarly. Surprisingly, while there are a few tokens of the phrase floating around, none of the 16 apparently distinct uses of it carried the "prima donna" wisecrack that your host was trying to imply.
Perhaps your host has the wrong view of coloratura sopranos? Searching for "soprano" with "prima donna" turns up some 6,700 hits; making it "coloratura soprano" cuts that figure by more than half, to 2,780. A cursory inspection of the resulting hits suggests that for the most part, "prima donna" is used to mean "leading lady" with no overtones of the hysteria or ego that Webster's calls sense #2 of the phrase. Either your host has been wildly misled for the past quarter-century...or musicians and critics the world over don't want to risk the possibility that their local prima donnas will read what they're thinking on the Internet.
I'm afraid this is an idiosyncrasy of your own. I've been a fan of opera for over 30 years, and I've never known anyone to use "coloratura" in this way. Prima donnas are generally the big beefy Wagner/Puccini specialists, not the birdlike trill-ladies.
Posted by: language hat | September 13, 2004 at 07:14 PM
Fair enough; I've had the association in my head for a long time, but I can't really say where I got it from. If I had to guess, I'd say coloratura = diva, and diva = insufferable, but what put me onto that is something I can't recall.
Posted by: Semantic Compositions | September 13, 2004 at 07:36 PM