The Diva Dance song was composed in 1997 by French composer Éric Serra at the request of film maker Luc Besson for the movie The Fifth Element (1997). It becomes the highlight of the film. In the movie the actress who played the “Diva Plavalaguna“, the alien, was Maïwenn Le Besco, but the voice was that of the Albanian soprano Inva Mula and many musical passages were improved for obvious reasons with the help of a sound sampler.
The piece was specifically written to not being sung by a human being because physiologically impossible. When Éric Serra showed for the first time Diva Dance notes to Inva Mula, she pointed out that some sentences were impossible to sing, because the human voice cannot jump between notes so far apart on the music scale as it was written on the score. Therefore those notes were sung separately and then the recorded tracks were superimposed. Listening to the song there are some moments when you can clearly feel it.
“For the scene to work, we needed her to sound like an alien, therefore we had to create notes that no human could sing. So I purposely wrote un-singable things, some too low, some too high, sentences that were too fast, I would then arrange it with the sampler. I had never worked with an opera singer before, I didn’t quite realise the technical ability they had, I thought that only 60% of the song was actually possible to sing. (…) We sat down and she started to sing, I was overwhelmed. She sang 85% of what I thought was technically impossible. I then sampled and edited her voice a bit. It might seem obvious nowadays but at the time many wondered how I did it.” – said Éric Serra during interview for the Trax Magazine on 05/08/2016.
“I have heard over the years dozens of Diva Dance cover and I must say that the vast majority of them clearly shows the skill of the performers. Actually you cannot approach “The Diva Dance” if you aren’t technically prepared to do so. But the fact is that none of the versions I’ve heard comes close to the original. On the other hand, as we have said, the original itself is a “fake”, in the sense that it’s the effect of a considerable post-production work. Well, Jane’s rendition is the best ever made, approaching the original more than any other. I agree with the fact that there’s still missing some note, especially in quick phrases, but to date there’s no human being that can succeed.” Eric Serra.
