Creativity Quote by Maria Callas

Callas frames performance as possession, and it is a canny choice: it makes greatness sound less like ego and more like inevitability. “I don’t know” is the strategic shrug of an artist whose work routinely inspired cultish awe; it invites the audience to believe that what happens under the lights is bigger than craft, bigger than the person doing it. Yet the line also protects her. If “something else” takes over, then the risks - the excess, the volatility, the emotional nakedness - aren’t vanity so much as necessity.

The subtext is that the stage is both refuge and battlefield. Callas was scrutinized as much for her private life and “diva” mythology as for her sound. Claiming an outside force shifts attention away from gossip and toward the event itself: the performance as transformation, not biography. It also quietly asserts professionalism. Only someone with punishing technique can afford to describe artistry as surrender; the trance is built on discipline, not whim.

In context, opera demands this kind of double self. Singers must be athletes and actors at once, hitting unforgiving notes while selling jealousy, grief, ecstasy to the back row. Callas, famous for turning arias into psychological scenes, suggests that the real instrument isn’t just the voice - it’s her capacity to disappear into character. The line flatters the audience, too: if something “takes over,” then witnessing her live isn’t consumption, it’s contact with an unpredictable force.