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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."