Music's Wonder Woman
When Sarah Caldwell was a child in Maryville, Mo., her favorite day of the year was the Fourth of July. She loved to stage elaborate backyard fireworks. As would happen later on, Sarah's creativity was challenged. "I was not allowed to bring them home until the night before," she recalls, "but I had them put aside for me in stores all over town. I would set them all out on the table and look them over: sparklers, snakes, cherry bombs, Roman candles, firecrackers. Then I'd make my plans." Sarah's displays were a hit in Maryville. She says with satisfaction: "I was a specialist in nighttime fireworks."
Today the stick that Sarah uses in her shows is a baton instead of a punk. As for the fuses, they are infinitely more elaborate connections. But at Boston's Orpheum theater, or wherever her Opera Company of Boston is playing, she lights up music, just as she did the Maryville sky, with boldly inventive productions.
She is justly called the first lady of American opera, but there is no one man in the U.S. who can match her versatility, resourcefulness and sheer talent. In just a few years, all by herself, she built a great opera company in Boston, a city that did not really want one. Operating in what a colleague describes as "a wilderness of gymnasiums, hockey rinks, old movie houses, an indoor track and a converted flower stall," Caldwell produced operas, including difficult ones that no one else would touch, and staged them ingeniously (she had to, given her cramped quarters). Working day and night as her own conductor, administrative boss, stage director, talent hunter, principal researcher and fund raiser, she has become a symbol of the vigorous growth of opera in dozens of cities around the U.S. She is also one of the great impresarios in all the American performing arts.
Boston has known and enjoyed this for years. From now on, Sarah Caldwell, 51, is going to be hard to miss elsewhere around the U.S., and not just because she carries close to 300 Ibs. on a 5-ft. 3-in. frame. Next week she will become the second woman to mount the podium at the New York Philharmonic (the famed French pianist and teacher Nadia Boulanger was the first, in 1939). The program, co-sponsored by Ms magazine, will be entirely devoted to the works of women composers (see box page 59). In January she will become the first woman ever to conduct at New York's Metropolitan Opera, leading Verdi's La Traviata, starring Beverly Sills. In addition to all this, she is conducting the Pittsburgh, Detroit, New Orleans and San Antonio symphonies this season.
It was Dr. Samuel Johnson who described opera as "an exotic and irrational entertainment." No one exemplifies that early diagnosis more than Caldwell. Her success story is anything but logical or coherent. Her energy would be impressive for a basketball star; for a beach ball of a woman, it is phenomenal. Her friend Beverly Sills describes Sarah's voice as "Ezio Pinza imitating a woman," but she can sweet-talk almost anybody out of, and into, anything.
With no money of her own to work with, she has extravagantly invested other people's in her productions. On occasion., she has had to raise the curtain on an unfinished set. Once a curtain went up an hour late while stagehands were assured that their checks would not bounce. Costumes have been left in pieces on the floor when designer racks were seized for nonpayment. Most of the time, generous supporters have managed to rescue her. There was, for example, the night the trucks rolled up from St. Louis with the sets for La Traviata. The C.O.D. charge was $9,600. Caldwell offered the drivers a check. They were not amused. What to do? She phoned an executive owner of Boston's Stop & Shop food chain, and a store manager obligingly made the rounds of the stores and returned with the needed amount in 10s and 20s stuffed into brown paper bags. Next morning all was well as Soprano Joan Sutherland arrived for her first rehearsal.
Caldwell's simple but consuming ambition is to give her fans a good evening of musical theater. "The fact is that great musical pieces take and hold the stage because they provide great emotional experiences," she says. So convinced, she relates everything to opera in general and her company in particular. In the days when a terrified city was on guard against the Boston Strangler, she remarked, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if they'd catch the strangler at the opera!"
She is absent-minded about anything not connected with her work and casual about her own money, as distinct from production funds. She has lost a small fortune in pocketbooks left in restaurants all over town. A friend once squeezed into her little car with Sarah and was startled to find $5 and $10 bills from a paper bag "floating all over the car and out the window" as they breezed down the turnpike. More concerned about her public image now, Sarah pays greater attention to her clothes. But only a few years ago, if a button popped on a blouse, she would simply pin it with a brooch. On really bad days she could be seen waddling through town with her entire chest hung with brooches of all description--medals of a long campaign.
With an initial nest egg of only $5,000, Caldwell's company began as the Opera Group of Boston in 1957. After a while, its home, the commodious Back Bay Theater, was torn down in favor of an apartment building. Unruffled, Caldwell marched on, and by 1965 the group had grown into a full-fledged company, and its name was changed. Today the Opera Company of Boston performs in the 2,000-seat Orpheum, a former vaudeville and movie house that has a stage only 26 ft. deep and no pit at all; the orchestra sits on the main floor. To conduct, Caldwell enters through a side door, pads down an aisle in slippers, and plops onto the canvas director's chair that serves as her podium.
In this and other unlikely showcases, Caldwell has staged the U.S. premieres of such diverse works as Berlioz's The Trojans, Schoenberg's Moses and Aron and Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie. With Caldwell, Sutherland appeared in the first U.S. staging of Bellini's IPuritani and the first since 1906 of Rossini's Sem-'iramide. Over a 13-year period, Soprano Sills has sung in 15 Caldwell productions. Marilyn Home, Tito Gobbi, Nicolai Gedda, Placido Domingo and Jon Vickers have all sung with her.
Audiences jaded by the cliches of opera-as-usual have been delighted by Caldwell's frequent and highly plausible new looks at old friends. Violetta in Traviata emerges not as the usual high-class tart with a heart of gold, but as an older woman resigned to her fate. The Druid priestess Norma? An albino, whose white hair and skin made her people think she was possessed and therefore a powerful leader.
Boston, so far at least, is not a city that can support two months of repertory opera, like Chicago and San Francisco. Caldwell puts on four or five operas a season between January and June. For each production, she assembles a cast for two weeks of rehearsals and then a week of performances. Doing her operas one at a time, with no cast changes, enables her to approximate the ideal of festival conditions. That gives her performances a snap and cohesion rarely matched at, say, the Met, which does a different opera every night with shifting casts. Says Gilbert Helmsley, Caldwell's lighting designer and all-round production factotum: "She knows she makes good theater. She knows she makes good opera. I will never forget her sitting in her dressing room in 1974 and inhaling the applause for her Barber of Seville. Deep down inside, you know, she knows, that when 2,000 people are making that kind of noise after a production, you've done it."
How she does it can often be as much of a show as what the audience finally sees. Take the time she gave Beverly Sills the bird. In Barber, Sills portrayed the young and lovely Rosina, who is being kept a virtual prisoner by her guardian, Dr. Bartolo. Caldwell first had the notion that Rosina's room should be a bird cage, complete with swing. Then to underline the metaphor, Caldwell decided that Rosina should carry a small song bird in a miniature cage. And so, one afternoon Sills found herself in a shop on New York's Madison Avenue looking at rare music boxes.,
"I found a bird but it cost $185," remembers Sills. "At that price, I decided to call Sarah. Sarah said, 'Could you bring the bird close to the telephone?' So I brought it close and gave it a wind. Then she said to me, 'Now sing.' I said, 'Are you some kind of lunatic? I'm in a store full of people on Madison Avenue.' " What Sarah wanted was a bird that sang a cadenza Sills could imitate. And so Beverly chirped into the phone. The mechanical bird was bought and on opening night almost stole the show.
Searching out historical and musical details to give her productions authenticity, Caldwell is constantly on the road.
Next spring she will present Montezuma by the American composer Roger Sessions. It is a spectacle of formidable musical and technical dimensions that Caldwell has wanted to stage for years. In 1971, just to get the feel of the thing, she went to Mexico and retraced the victory trail of the Spanish conqueror Hernando Cortez. Last week she was back again, studying the pyramids in Teotihuacan.
Caldwell relaxes on these junkets, joking, shopping, making friends. But once back home and inside the theater, says former Production Assistant Seamus Curran, "Sarah goes through people like water." Especially stage managers. "She eats them," says Lighting Designer Helmsley. The stage manager must follow schedules meticulously and see that everyone else does too. It is not an easy task when the boss disregards any regimen. Caldwell may rehearse her singers from morning to midnight, then keep a crew on until 4 or 5 a.m. for lighting rehearsals. During the latter, says Helmsley, "she invariably goes to sleep.
So you wake her up to get a decision. She goes back to sleep. You wake her up. She goes back to sleep."
On occasion Caldwell will tell the last man out of the theater to lock her in, then gaze for hours at the stage (and boxes, which she regularly uses as an extension of the stage), trying to figure out a way to adjust that small rectangle to her large vision. She has been known to doze off--one time lying in a heap of curtains in an aisle --and be ready to go the next morning.
That some people attribute her round-theclock hours to her lack of organization is something she resents emphatically. "We don't have a theater of our own," she says. "When we rent one we only have it for twelve days before a production. We have to bring in everything to make the place an opera house, and there is so much to be done that it is necessary to work in the theater 24 hours a day." So necessary, in fact, that her associates are regularly dispatched to bring her everything from hamburgers and Cokes to pantyhose. "Everyone around her has made at least one pantyhose run," says one amused staffer.
Caldwell is never more alive than when rehearsing. That, of course, is when she accomplishes most of her actual work. As the lights dim, she will chortle, "Ho ho ho, magic time," and begin to study the stage through those Thespian prisms that pass for eyes. One of her greatest but least appreciated strengths is her sense of proportion, or scale. In The Trojans Sarah made the horse as big as she could on her small stage, but was still not satisfied with the effect. Who finally emerged from the horse? Midgets and children costumed as soldiers. Sarah gets around surprisingly well for a 300-pounder. Often she resembles a great mother whale with a school of pilot fish circling her. "Yup, nope, yup, yup," she mumbles to a series of rapid-fire questions. When noisemakers get out of hand, she shouts: "Will you quell the rebellion backstage!"
If Caldwell is hard on everybody, she is harder on herself.
The final rehearsal for Verdi's Don Carlos in 1973 lasted nine hours. The orchestra call was only for five, and on the dot the players got up and walked out. A pianist picked up where they had left off, and Caldwell went on conducting, barely missing a beat, giving cues right and left to the absent musicians. When the pianist dropped out after two hours, another took over.
Caldwell can shriek at the chorus, growl at the stagehands, spit fire at a careless secondary singer, but usually will serve sweet honey to her soloists. She solicits their advice and often takes it. During rehearsals for Barber, Bass-Baritone Donald Gramm said that it might be fun if the glass in his hand broke as Sills hit a high C in the lesson scene. Caldwell loved the idea and put it in. "As both conductor "and director, I am very much aware that it is those people up there doing it onstage," she says. "I can help them put the mosaic together, but unless they have participated and made some choices, it is nothing." There is never, however, any improvising with the music.
She coaches and rehearses her singers until, she says, "they learn the music so well that it sails out of them." And the authentic version too. "It is important to start by going back to the original manuscript because so much in opera happened before the age of photography, when music copying began to be a more exact science." That kind of reverence for the printed notes does not keep Caldwell from having a little fun now and then. In the party scene from her 1972 Traviata, the champagne corks were popped in time to the music. Her 1973 Daughter of the Regiment found Sills onstage slicing potatoes on the beat as she made chicken Marengo. That left the howling audience unprepared for the delivery of the next ingredient--the brandy--by a St. Bernard dog.
"I think that when she's on the podium and the performance is going on, that is a happy moment," says Sills. "But I don't think she is a totally happy woman. All the exhibitionistic things she does, conducting, staging, running her own opera company, would make her seem a total extravert. But I think by nature she's a very shy lady." Sarah's friends are all people connected with her musical endeavors. Says Helmsley: "I respect her singlemindedness, but it's a very lonely road."
Almost from the start, Caldwell was bright, determined and, if not alone, then frequently on her own. "I try not to be a stage mother," says her mother Margaret, A "but she was very gifted, with a great fondness for mu sic and great reading and mathematical abilities at an early age." Sarah's parents were divorced when she was an infant; until she was remarried twelve years later, the mother was frequently away continuing her own graduate studies in music. Sarah stayed with relatives, who saw to it that mementos from her mother were on hand. "Because my mother was gone, I was raised with pictures of her and stories of how bright and smart she was. Her report cards seemed inhumanly good."
At five Sarah was a good enough fiddler to play chamber music with adults. By six she was giving concerts as far away as Chicago. When her mother married Henry Alexander, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas, Sarah was pleased. "He kept a dictionary on the dinner table," Caldwell recalls.
"He told me I could study all the music I wanted, but that he hoped I would choose to study something different in college."
She obliged by enrolling as a psychology major at the University of Arkansas. But within a year and a half, she moved on to Hendrix College in Arkansas to study with a violin teacher named David Robertson. A year and a half after that, she won a scholarship at the New England Conservatory of Music to study with Richard Burgin, who was also the concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. If Burgin's blunt recollection these days is any indication, Sarah got a shock. Says Burgin: "She wasn't particularly talented on violin, and I suggested she study some other line of music."
Sarah was soon studying viola with Boston Symphony Violist Georges Flourel, who apparently had a higher opinion of her talent. In 1946 she won a scholarship to play viola in the student orchestra at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony. "It was a place where gods strode the earth," says Caldwell quite seriously. Her particular idol was Conductor Serge "200%" to Koussevitsky, their who own urged work the but made it students to clear that apply they themselves should not miss any of his concerts. Sarah wore T shirts, heavy shoes that clunked, straight hair to the nape of the neck, and, as she recalls, "had more fun at Tanglewood than anywhere else."
It was there in 1947 that Sarah staged "my lucky piece," Vaughan Williams' Riders to the Sea, a one-act opera based on J.M. Synge's melancholy play. "Koussevitsky came backstage, and that was very nice, and the next summer I was invited to join the faculty," she says. A major influence on Caldwell during that period was Boris Goldovsky, who headed the opera department at the New England Conservatory and, in the U.S. at least, was a solitary champion of the concept of opera as theater. Sarah served as Goldovsky's assistant, even writing scripts for his intermission programs during the Met radio broadcasts.
Caldwell was too strong a personality to stay on. In 1952 she was hired as head of the Boston University opera workshop and over the next eight years developed a full-fledged opera department within the school. When she left in 1960 after her opera company had been established, not all her colleagues were heartbroken. Then as now, she involved her staff in everything--including driving her to Chinatown for post-rehearsal suppers. One of her former students recalls that Caldwell was already traveling a lot and often did not get back in time for classes, "so she got in the habit of taping her lectures on the road and mailing them back."
The momentum of Caldwell's career has paralleled the upsurge of what used to be referred to as regional opera. Today it seems more accurate simply to call it American opera, because the scene is so vital and diverse. In the U.S., it was not the Met that first performed the Ring cycle within a week as Wagner intended, but the Seattle Opera (TIME, Aug. 4). Who gave the American stage premiere of Handel's memorable Baroque opera Rinaldol The Houston Grand Opera (TIME, Nov. 3). Dvorak's wondrously melodic Rusalka will be introduced to the U.S. next month not in New York but in San Diego.
In recent years Caldwell has successfully staged Hans Werner Henze's The Young Lord and Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos for the New York City Opera. In the summer of 1974 she conducted and restaged her War and Peace at Wolf Trap outside Washington, D.C.
Caldwell's opera credentials are plainly in order. As to her symphonic conducting, the prospects look good, but it is still too early for a final verdict. She rarely repeats any of the selections on her orchestral programs ("I'm not one to take the money and run by playing the same works all over the country"). She performs almost all the music for the first time and has never before worked with most of the orchestras she conducts. It takes an orchestra a while to get used to any new piece of music and any conductor. By making her New York Philharmonic debut next week with a woman's program new to both the orchestra and herself, Caldwell is almost asking for trouble.
Boston orchestra musicians admire her, but many agree that her real genius is directing. Because of her weight, says one musician, "she has to sit down, so you really can't see her." Another takes a more show business view of the situation: "Let's face it, she's box office. Sarah is the Luis Tiant of opera." Sarah, who likes the roar of the crowd as much as any athlete and loves baseball, might just take that as a compliment.
Being box office, as she now is, Sarah can afford a somewhat more comfortable lifestyle. For the past five years she has shared a home with her widowed mother, who is now 73. Last spring they gave up their cluttered apartment in Boston's Back Bay and moved to a six-room house in suburban Weston. Sarah has an office containing shelves of records, tapes and books and a butcher-board worktable. The closets full of dresses bearing such labels as Thea Porter of London indicate that Caldwell is more concerned about her looks than seems apparent. Her mother's meals are brought to her from a restaurant, often by a member of Caldwell's staff.
Sarah invariably makes far more commitments in a day than she can ever hope to keep; an aide is regularly on the phone canceling or postponing something. Mindful of all that, Houston Opera Director David Gockley cracks: "Sarah is an administrator only in the sense that no one else can administrate her."
The board chairman of the Opera Company of Boston knows Caldwell as well as anyone. He is U.S. Senator Edward Brooke, who calls Sarah "A dreamer, a genius, a most exciting woman," in that order. At the moment, the dreamer has two things on her mind. One is to conduct Louise at the Paris Opera. The other is a new opera house --which is going to be exactly as she wants it or not at all. No recycled movie palaces, thank you. Caldwell wants a structure that will contain a small (800 seats) Baroque theater, a more traditional auditorium (2,000 seats) for 19th century opera and a larger (2,500 to 3,000 seats) hall for film, TV and experimental opera. All she needs is $40 million. That may take a while. It will surely take a lot of brown paper bags. But nobody is betting against Sarah.
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