It's peculiar how retirement takes some operatic divas after the final curtain falls. After wasting her time and passion on Aristotle Onassis, and blowing those obsidian soprano tones - and surgical bel canto attack - in the last shocking period of a once epic career, Maria Callas spent her final days as a virtual recluse in the gilded cage of her Paris apartment. She died of a heart attack in 1977 at the age of 53, a tragic heroine in the (soap) opera of her own life.
That other bel canto goddess, La Stupenda Joan Sutherland, Australia's most dramatic coloratura soprano, returned home to bow out with a memorable Marguerite de Valois in Les Huguenots at the Sydney Opera House in 1990, and then hastened to her garden in Montreux, Switzerland. She eventually dismissed even the idea of occasional teaching - 'I'm 80 years old and I don't want to have anything to do with opera anymore' - in favour of becoming a figurehead for the Cardiff Singer of the World competition; a terrible waste when so many of today's young pretenders lack simple vocal technique and seasoned mentors who, in every sense, know the score.
Still, it could be worse. A month ago, I attended a young and upcoming British conductor's birthday dinner and was seated opposite another diva in her supposed dotage.
Over five indifferent courses she got drunk and mortified the table by displaying her belated discovery of marijuana and single malt whiskey after three full-throttle decades of international productions, a rigid recording schedule and hour on sapping hour of practice to keep her upper register note-by-note precise. After an adulthood of unwanted celebrity and professional virtue she had embraced casual private vice, and her old profession could crash down and become the ruined fiefdom of poperatic tarts like 'Katherine, Hayley and Charlotte'.
'If audiences want airbrushed and pretty-pretty over real and religiously dedicated, who am I to correct the stupid b*****ds?' she slurred. 'What's lost except a f*****g art form?'
You couldn't really blame her, of course. Yet as the evening ground on - and on - I nevertheless found that I did.