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.