Opera Company founder dies at 82
Sarah Caldwell, the beloved founder of the Opera Company of Boston who was the first female to conduct New York’s Metropolitan Opera, has died. She was 82.
Caldwell died of heart failure Thursday at the Maine Medical Center, according to Jim Morgan, former manager of the company and a lifelong friend.
During its 33-year history, the Opera Company of Boston ran on a shoestring budget and often had to use gymnasiums, college auditoriums and rented theaters. It closed in 1991 due to lack of funds.
But it staged a staggering list of American premieres, including Arnold Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” Serge Prokofiev’s “War and Peace,” Hector Berlioz’ “Les Troyens,” Luigi Nono’s “Intolleranza,” Berg’s “Lulu” and Roger Session’s “Montezuma.”
Caldwell acted as producer, director, scenery designer, publicist and conductor for most of these and the other 100 operas she produced.
“If you can sell green toothpaste in this country, you can sell opera,” she once noted.
Caldwell drew on emerging singers, such as soprano Beverly Sills and Marilyn Horne, as well as established stars, bringing singers such as Joan Sutherland, Tito Gobbi, George London, Nicolai Gedda and Placido Domingo, among others, to her productions.
Sills’ collaboration with Caldwell began in 1961, when Sills, “very pregnant,” she said, with her first son, received a call inviting her to sing the lead in a production of “Die Fledermaus.” Forgetting her condition in the excitement, Sills said yes, then immediately had to call Caldwell back to decline.
“She said, ‘You weren’t pregnant two minutes ago?’ ” Sills said Friday. “That was how our romance began. We did so many extraordinary things together.”
Caldwell started her Boston Opera Group, later renamed Opera Company of Boston, in 1957 on a budget of $5,000, going on to conduct repertory from the baroque to the avant-garde.
In 1976, she became the first female to conduct the Metropolitan Opera, in a production of “La Traviata” with Sills. She also conducted the New York Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Boston Symphony, among others.
But in 1984, she had a bout of double pneumonia that almost killed her. She was hospitalized for several weeks during which she was placed in intensive care and on a respirator. She spent three months of hospitalization and recuperation in Florida, embarking on a new health regimen. Always troubled by a weight problem, Caldwell conducted sitting in a large armchair.
She recovered, but her company did not. She was active in a variety of posts, including organizing a series of Russian-American cultural exchanges in 1988.
Caldwell received the National Medal of the Arts in 1997.
“She was the Orson Welles of the operatic world,” said Sills. “She could just do anything.”