Our Arklahoma Heritage: A musical prodigy graduated from Fayetteville High School and the UofA at an early age
The girl who finished Fayetteville High School at fourteen did not leave a stone in Evergreen Cemetery or a marker on the Square.
Sarah Caldwell was born March 6, 1924, in Maryville, Missouri, to Edwin F. Caldwell and Carrie Margaret Baker, a pianist who had studied in New York. The marriage ended when Sarah was two. For a time, her mother left her with relatives while finishing graduate work in music, and the child moved among households, including Kansas City.
Summers she went back to Maryville, once winning a contest on a guitar she had built from a cigar box. When Sarah was about twelve, Carrie married Henry Alexander, who taught political science at the University of Arkansas, and the family settled in Fayetteville. That is how a Missouri prodigy became an Arkansas story.
She was already a public musician. Accounts place the violin in her hands as early as age four and recitals before audiences by ten. Mathematics came as easily as pitch. Fayetteville High graduated her with the class of 1938. She was fourteen.
She enrolled at the university because her stepfather taught there and because he thought psychology a sensible major. She lasted a year and a half, then went to Hendrix College in Conway, finished a violin course in short order, formed a string quartet, and sat in with the Arkansas Symphony before she was eighteen.
Scholarships carried her to the New England Conservatory, where she studied violin with Richard Burgin, concertmaster of the Boston Symphony. In 1946 she won a viola place at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. A year later she staged Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Riders to the Sea.
Serge Koussevitzky put her on the Tanglewood opera faculty. Boris Goldovsky made her his chief assistant for eleven years. The violin recitals of a Fayetteville schoolgirl had become a vocation she would not put down.
Boston became the long middle of her life. She ran the opera workshop at Boston University in the 1950s and in 1958 founded the company later known as the Opera Company of Boston. She was conductor, stage director, and producer at once, often in borrowed halls and converted movie houses, always short of money and never short of scores other companies left on the shelf.
She gave American listeners Berlioz’s Les Troyens, Prokofiev’s War and Peace, Roger Sessions’s Montezuma, Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten, and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Taverner. She said she wanted music that was wonderful and, for some odd reason, still unexplored.
In 1975 Time put her on the cover and called her the best opera director in the United States.
On January 13, 1976, she became the first woman to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera, leading Verdi’s La traviata with Beverly Sills. She returned for L’elisir d’amore with José Carreras. Public television carried her Barber of Seville and Falstaff. She stood before the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Pittsburgh Symphony.
One commercial recording survives in wide circulation, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, with Sills, Alfredo Kraus, Alan Titus, and Donald Gramm. In 1978 she received the first Kennedy Center Award for Excellence. In 1997 President Bill Clinton placed the National Medal of Arts in her hands.
Arkansas later put her in its Entertainers Hall of Fame. The University of Arkansas had already given her an honorary degree in 1968, when David Mullins still sat in the president’s office.
The company collapsed in the early 1990s, more than five million dollars in debt. She sold the last house, took guest podiums in Russia, and accepted work wherever a season still wanted her. In the fall of 1999, she came home as distinguished professor of music at the University of Arkansas and took charge of the opera program.
The appointment was brief. She was hospitalized in 2001, went on leave, and retired in 2004.
She moved to Freeport, Maine, and lived there with Jim Morgan, her longtime colleague and the former manager of the Boston company. She never married. She had no children. In directories she often declined to list her parents’ names.
What she left of her own voice is Challenges: A Memoir of My Life in Opera, drawn from interviews Rebecca Matlock recorded in the last years and published in 2008.
Sarah Caldwell died of heart failure on March 23, 2006, at Maine Medical Center in Portland. She was eighty-two. The service was private. She was cremated. The resting place of the ashes has not been made public.
Fayetteville High still prints her name among its alumni. Special Collections at the university holds a modest run of her papers and the 1968 commencement photograph. The Met still dates a barrier from the night she raised her baton over La traviata.
The girl who left campus at fourteen did not return to be buried here. She returned, late and unwell, to teach for a little while in the town that first heard her play.
