A Diva Goes Too Far and Suffers a Mere Mortal’s Fate : Opera: The tantrums that got Kathleen Battle sacked at the Met may be rooted in a too-rapid rise to stardom.

Kathleen Battle’s dismissal from the Metropolitan Opera this month was major news in every important American publication. The public was surprised, even if insiders were not.

Why the shock? After all, the world of opera is riven by treachery and tragedy, a world populated--on stage and off--by larger-than-life stars of fiery temperament. Tempers flare, egos are ruffled, stars are born. And, anyway, aren’t divas supposed to be divas?

Although the cognoscenti have long clucked over Battle’s escalating demands--one joke had it that “if Kathy Battle married (pianist) Emmanuel Ax, we could call her Kathy Battle-Ax”--much of the public was nonetheless upset to learn that an artist of such exquisite beauty, such delicate musical phrasing and such refined portrayals of the ingenue could be so nasty. Yet behavior that opera lovers affectionately forgive as part of being a diva would rightly be regarded as offensive and narcissistic by the rest of us.

There is a long tradition at work here. Divas have been known to refuse to sing with a conductor if they disagree over a tempo, break a contract if they cannot abide a director’s interpretation or plunge an opera management into administrative chaos over a last-minute cancellation owing to a soupcon of a cold. But, for the most part, such behavior always seemed to be in the service of art (or, at least, such was the conceit). The artist could not defame his beloved Verdi, say, by singing a phrase too slowly or too quickly, by updating the historical period in which the opera was originally set, by not serving the composer’s intentions (at least insofar as the artist imagined them), by illness, however slight, or lack of inspiration.

Even when divas seemed to compete with each other in the philosophy they espoused--for instance, Maria Callas’ credo that singing was about interpreting the soul of a character versus Renata Tebaldi’s conviction that it was about being faithful to the beauty of the vocal line--the rivalry seemed rooted in artistic differences.

Battle’s recent difficulties, on the other hand, signal a new and alarming mutation. Rather than quarrel over artistic or musical matters, she fights over turf and power. For example, she has had tantrums over the size of her dressing room and the size of her limousine (when the limo that was sent to take her to President Clinton’s inauguration struck her as insufficiently stretched, she refused to travel until a larger one was found). Insider cynics suspect that Battle’s obsession with the size of dressing rooms and limos might be connected to the fact that among her peers in the opera pantheon, she possesses the smallest voice.

It remains odd that Battle should have so recklessly pushed her employer to so publicly denounce her. Perhaps the explanation lies in the rapidity with which she shot to stardom and her possible failure to emotionally prepare for it. The facts of her life are instructive.

Battle was born in 1948 in Portsmouth, Ohio, the seventh child of a steelworker originally from Alabama. When she wavered between studying math and pursuing music, her high school music teacher encouraged her to enroll at the Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. In 1970, Battle received a bachelor’s degree in music education; the following year she was awarded her master’s. For the next two years, she taught music to inner-city elementary students.

Then, the fairy tale happened. Thomas Schippers, the renowned conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, heard her and immediately engaged her to sing Brahms with the orchestra. Sometime later, she met fellow Cincinnatian James Levine, artistic director of the Met. Levine was, in his words, “blown away,” and became Battle’s mentor, coach and chief employer for the next 20 years. (Levine has so far been silent with regard to Battle’s current troubles.)

Perhaps because Battle felt herself better prepared for teaching music than performing it, such a serendipitous career path and relatively sudden stardom at the most important opera house in America simply went to her head. (Battle once said, “I never would have dreamed of being a performance major.”) It is, for many people, frightening to be at the top, and inner insecurity is often masked by an effort to belittle others.

This is an old and sad story, doubly sad to see it now being played out so publicly with so gifted a musician. Though opera ennobles and inspires us with grand tales of human suffering and achievement, it is nonetheless disappointing to find that the very Olympians who move us so can be as petty as we mortals.