Even by the famously hot-blooded standards of opera, last week’s passionate dramma giocoso at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City was positively — well, operatic. In the fiery lead role was the mercurial lyric soprano Kathleen Battle, renowned for leaving a trail of ill will in her wake wherever she goes. Opposing her were the forces of decorum and rectitude, represented by Met general manager Joseph Volpe. The denouement was catastrophe. Volpe, citing “unprofessional actions . . . profoundly detrimental to the artistic collaboration among all the cast members,” summarily fired Battle from this week’s production of Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment and withdrew all future offers. In so doing, he set off grand international choruses of “It’s about time.” The combative diva, 45, is the darling of a huge public, a glamorous former schoolteacher from Portsmouth, Ohio, who possesses one of the loveliest voices in opera today. Thanks to her supple, dulcet soprano and winning stage personality — and with the powerful patronage of Met artistic director James Levine — she has risen to worldwide fame in secondary roles that ordinarily do not make stars, parts like Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Sophie in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Battle’s presence in a cast or with an orchestra practically guarantees a sold-out house; her albums, whether art songs or spirituals, are consistent best sellers. Behind the scenes, however, Battle often lives up to her martial surname. Divas are expected to be difficult; opera lore is rife with tales of their devouring egos and overweening eccentricities — not to mention the outrageous quirks of arrogant male singers, especially tenors. But Battle is, according to many who have worked with her, impossible. Fussy, erratic and arbitrary, the headstrong soprano has infuriated colleagues and administrators and crossed swords with functionaries and hapless hoteliers across the globe. The cast of The Daughter of the Regiment applauded when it was told during rehearsal that Battle had been fired. Stories about her pettiness are legion: the time in Boston she telephoned the management of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to complain that the Ritz- Carlton’s room service had put peas in her pasta; the time when, feeling chilly while riding in a limo in Southern California, she used the cellular phone to call her management company in New York, which phoned the limo service, which phoned the driver, who turned the air conditioning down; the time in New York when she and Luciano Pavarotti competed to see which could arrive later for a dress rehearsal. Battle has a penchant for changing hotel suites in the middle of a stay just to vary the color of her surroundings. After her appearances at the San Francisco Opera this season, the backstage crew sported T shirts that read: I SURVIVED THE BATTLE. The Met’s Volpe finally lost patience with her rehearsal shenanigans — which included lateness and even absence, as well as withering criticism of her fellow performers and flaky, almost paranoid demands that they not look at her. Battle’s role in the production is now being sung by Harolyn Blackwell.
