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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.