Quotes by Maria Callas

“You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.”

“That is the difference between good teachers and great teachers: good teachers make the best of a pupil's means great teachers foresee a pupil's ends. ”

“When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed the point.”

“I prepare myself for rehearsals like I would for marriage.”

“An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera ho...”

“When my enemies stop hissing, I shall know I'm slipping.”

“Some say I have a beautiful voice, some say I have not. It is a matter of opinion. All I can say, those who don't like it shouldn't come to hear me.”

“I admire Tebaldi's tone; it's beautiful — also some beautiful phrasing. Sometimes, I actually wish I had her voice.”

“What [Tullio Serafin] said that impressed me was: When one wants to find a gesture, when you want to find how to act on stage, all you have to do is listen to the music. The composer has already se...”

“What a lovely voice, but who cares?”

“Don't talk to me about rules, dear. Wherever I stay I make the goddamn rules.”

“Bel canto does not mean beautiful singing alone. It is, rather, the technique demanded by the composers of this style — Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini. It is the same attitudes and demands of Moza...”

“It takes a little more time to get into the role, but not very much more. In making a record you don't have the sense of projection over a distance as in an opera house. We have this microphone and...”

“[Serafin was] an extraordinary coach, sharp as a vecchio lupo [old wolfe]. He opened a world to me, showed me there was a reason for everything, that even fiorature and trills ... have a reason in ...”

“I would not kill my enemies, but I will make them get down on their knees. I will, I can, I must.”

“I happen to think that Callas was the greatest singer of the 20th century. I feel that so many people have learned the wrong things from her, rather than the right things. She was a fabulous musici...”

“Callas was such an example of professionalism. One thinks of her as a flighty diva, which is the wrong thing to learn from her, and she wasn’t at all.”

“From Callas, I learned to respect the music. It’s part of the attention to detail. Today, everything seems to me a bit homogenized. Puccini sounds like Handel which sounds like Bellini. Callas had ...”

“Callas was superhuman. She was on a whole other plane. She really was a Diva — the goddess — and the rest of us are basically her handmaidens.”

“That is such a difficult question. There are times when certain people are blessed — and cursed — with an extraordinary gift, in which the gift is almost greater than the human being. Callas was on...”