Callas interviewed by Mike Wallace

These clips (a 1973 interview rebroadcast after Callas’s death) have been making the rounds. They are interesting for a number of reasons:

• Callas’s archness in her heyday versus her poise in 1973
• Her responses to Edward R. Murrow (“I have never thrown anything at anyone, though sometimes…”) and to Sir Thomas Beecham (“I never threw anything at anyone—unfortunately…”)
• Mike Wallace’s gotcha journalism
• Small inaccuracies in the reporting (e.g. she did not leave Meneghini in 1958)
• Callas’s calm and dignified response to Wallace’s invasive questioning
• Her eloquence. One reads repeatedly that Callas was inarticulate, but in the 1973 interview, one hears the calm, reflective tone of the quotations in Maria Callas: Sacred Monster by Stelios Galatopoulos—quotations, truth be told, that to me have always been suspect, a little too tidy and polished.