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Challenges
A Memoir of My Life in Opera
Sales Date: 2008-08-01
256 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in
A powerful pioneer in opera and music recounts her struggles and triumphs
Founder and long-time director of the Opera Company of Boston and the first woman to conduct the Metropolitan Opera, Sarah Caldwell was one of America's best known and most adventurous conductors and opera directors. Her career spanned her wildly successful and innovative productions of classical operas such as Offenbach's Voyage to the Moon, Don Quixote, and Madama Butterfly to projects like "Making Music Together," which in 1988 brought together musicians and composers from the Soviet Union and the United States. Caldwell's work earned her many honorary degrees and she received the National Medal for the Arts from President Clinton in 1997. Challenges is based on a series of interviews Rebecca Matlock conducted over a period of three years before Caldwell's death in 2006. This intimate memoir gives us Caldwell's perceptions in her own unique, indomitable voice.
FOREWORD
IN BOSTON
I. The Boston Public Garden
II. The Little Opera House
III. The Donnelly Theater
IV. The Back Bay Theater
V. The Shubert Theater
VI. The Wandering Years
VII. The Orpheum Theater
VIII. The Opera House
BEYOND BOSTON
IX. Tanglewood
X. The Opera Group
XI. The American National Opera
XII. New York City
XIII. Around America
OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES
XIV. Germany, Israel, and South Africa
XV. The Americas
XVI. China
XVII. The Philippines
XVIII. The Soviet Union
XIX. Yekaterinburg, Russia
BACK IN BOSTON
XX. Difficulties and Options
AFTERWORD
SARAH CALDWELL – March 6. 1924 –March 23, 2006
INDEX
SARAH CALDWELL (1924–2006) founded the Opera Company of Boston in 1957, and was the first woman to conduct the Metropolitan Opera in New York City (1975). She also appeared with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. REBECCA MATLOCK is an author, photographer, and wife of the former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock. She served on the board of the Opera Company of Boston and now lives in Princeton, New Jersey, and Booneville, Tennessee.
"There are informative anecdotes about her early years with great singers (among them Renata Tebaldi, Joan Sutherland, Placido Domingo and Marilyn Horne) and her brilliant use of necessity as the mother of invention. Also intriguing was her search for original scores and editions before it became the fashion. As a pioneer with a vast frontier to conquer, she was a standout, and the book goes a long way toward showing us this."
~Opera News (New York Metropolitan Opera's magazine)
"A fascinating revelation of her life and endeavours by an incredible character, Sarah Caldwell."
~Dame Joan Sutherland, OM, AC, DBE, author of A Prima Donna's Progress
"Challenges illuminates the depth of Sarah Caldwell's lifelong profound and passionate dedication to opera performance. Her intellect, musical skills, and endless curiosity made her productions uniquely alive and stimulating to the opera world and to all who worked with her.""
~Phyllis Curtin, retired singer, Metropolitan Opera
""There are informative anecdotes about her early years with great singers (among them Renata Tebaldi, Joan Sutherland, Placido Domingo and Marilyn Horne) and her brilliant use of necessity as the mother of invention. Also intriguing was her search for original scores and editions before it became the fashion. As a pioneer with a vast frontier to conquer, she was a standout, and the book goes a long way toward showing us this.""
~Opera News (New York Metropolitan Opera's magazine)
""Her account of widening musical activities throughout the U.S. and the world has plenty of fascinating incidents, but none as relentlessly operative or rewarding as the Boston years. Recommended.""
~John Harrison, Opera Journal
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