Ask opera buffs who was the greatest soprano of the 20th century, and I’ll hazard that only the most determined contrarians will fail to name Maria Callas. NPR remembers la divina 27 years after her death. As one of the commentators in the story so aptly puts it, she had a way of making music sound inevitable: She sang an aria, and you felt a certainty that it was meant to be sung just that way. You can hear what I mean here. Though listening to Callas over RealAudio does bring to mind that line from Steppenwolf about straining to tease out the sublime in a scratchy grammophone recording.