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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.