"On one part of the street there was a shoe maker and his sign read:
BEST SHOES IN TOWN.
Another cobbler moved in and put up his sign:
BEST SHOES IN THE COUNTRY.
Still another put his sign up:
BEST SHOES IN THE WORLD.
Finally, the last came and when he put his sign up it read:
BEST SHOES ON THE BLOCK." - as told to me by Sarah Caldwell
Few people can claim the fame, and infamy, of our dear Sarah. One thing is for sure: very few people really and truly understood her, and even fewer stuck by her in the end. It is perhaps an age-old story of people that are blest with iconoclastic genius, but it is a little known fact about Sarah that if she loved you and cared about you, she was faithful to the end... Oh yeah, she had her moments of being a pain and being difficult, but I have known Sarah to ALWAYS come through when it really counted or when we had no one else to turn to. I can name a handful of my familiars during those years that are fully aware of what she actually did for them, and even fewer that appreciated it. The truth is, there were many people who were just getting started that Sarah helped and gave a chance, or perhaps never had a chance until she gave it to them. She was a fierce believer in 'family' and the 'family of the Opera Company of Boston.' Of course most of us know that families in this day and time can be extremely dysfunctional, and this family was certainly no exception.
Sarah was for me a friend, mother figure, inspiration, a source of livelihood, and what's more - a source of courage. In those years, she taught me so much about character, and what and HOW to believe in yourself at any cost. I'm afraid I haven't always learned that lesson, but it was nonetheless there for the learning.
In 1981, my soon-to-be husband, tenor Noel Espíritu Velasco, was offered the Artist-in-Residence position in Boston while I was still in Curtis. Being in school, terrified of the evil de Lancie regime which was second only to Hitler in my book with the way I was treated, and also lonely, wanting to be with Noel as he was commuting and living in Boston more than Philadelphia. I was by myself and “orphaned”, having my husband as my only immediate family. My father having died, being estranged from my mother and having no siblings, Noel was all I had. Sarah welcomed me to OCB when we met the first time at a Christmas party where she asked me to play something for the entertainment. I was thrilled to be able to, and thrilled to participate in something that my husband was a part of. I'll never forget it, I played something festive, the Waltz from the Godard Suite. She loved it, and said she would love to have me play there in the orchestra. She understood from the beginning that a happy singer with a wife that was engaged at the same company would want to stay and work there. I'm sure she liked my playing, but the sense of family and ‘belonging’ to her was equally as important. Those years were full of strange and unusual characters in the forms of Clifford Brooks and Nanine Boyce, not always people I liked, as they were not always likeable, but always 'interesting'.
I was accepted in Curtis’ Opera Department after only five months’ study with Noel, and de Lancie had seen and heard me perform. He offered me a double-major, and I had the opportunity to study voice at Curtis. Those studies would have commenced before I graduated with an orchestral degree and would have overlapped my last year, meaning a longer time in Philly and more time away from my Noel. I, however, had decided to leave upon completion of my degree in flute, and had committed wholeheartedly to being with my husband in Boston and finally making a life together. I felt it was just there waiting for me, and so to solidify that even more, I played my first show at Sarah's invitation before I even graduated school in early June of my third year at school. I'll never forget it. The piece was Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, and I remember that the orchestra got to wear funny little straw hats with a bow and ribbon that went down the back. Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca portrayed Styx and Miss Public Opinion. God, it was fun and funny! I was hooked then and there, and loved having felt I'd finally found my home, and it was at the OCB. As you can imagine, this created quite a stir around town. Who was this person suddenly playing principal flute?! I was "turned in" (I'm sure by another flutist who was jealous of my getting one of the best-paying gigs in town) and was told that I falsified my address. Well, when you're a kid and your partner lives one place and you live in another, where is your address exactly?! I'm afraid that I was awfully naïve and never quite understood the gravity of what I had been asked to do by Sarah by simply joining the Boston Musician's Union and accepting her offer to play there. The Union, being petty as it was in those days, brought me up on charges of falsifying my address, and had me appear before them in person for a ‘hearing’, which I did, crying the whole time from remorse and confusion at something that I was completely confused and unschooled about. I was asked to resign for a year until which time I would graduate and live in Boston full-time. I was not to accept any work or play in town until then. I complied, thinking at that time that this seemed perfectly normal, but in retrospect I could see the underhandedness of all that went on, and this was how I began my tenure at the OCB, a position which I held playing almost every single show for a period of 8 years, despite the disdain and anger of many flutists in town as well as the printable ire of Richard Dyer, who I'm sure had already decided not to like me because of things he could have heard from many people about me before I even made a sound in the Savoy Theater. Despite all this heaviness, those years were full of joy. Sarah and that job was an island, as it turns out, for me. And as we shall see later with the eventual demise of the company in the 90's, it became no longer my safe haven giving voice to my playing but a turning point. A turning point which shaped my life as it is today being forced to find a life somewhere else, doing something else. By strange circumstance it was an opportunity for a singing career. By even stranger circumstance that opportunity would be given to me later by none other than Sarah Caldwell herself.
Back in Boston,
Because I had some stage training from my studies with Curtis’ Opera Department, I was always interested in Sarah's staging rehearsals, and I was present a lot of the time during Noel's rehearsals in those years. If the orchestra thought they were cold in that theater those days, they hadn't even begun to fathom the worst of it, as much of the time the principal singers did their rehearsals in a theater where they could see their breath. Sarah Reese's authentic coughs as Mimi in her debut in La Boheme were not just 'acting', they were the reality that came with being part of the OCB family and rehearsing in the artic tundra known as the Opera House. The work was fulfilling, frustrating and somehow pregnant with hope of the amazing things to come. There were productions that were staged in part, and sometimes the staging was changed right before the curtain went up! In every production, I'm sure, people wondered how it ever came together on stage, but it always did, and I know they say it was despite Sarah, but I think rather it was some electricity in the air and some spark that she created, despite everything! Back then, hanging around rehearsals, I became a friend also to Noel’s colleagues, making my experience as I sat and did my job in the pit all the richer, because I was not just an orchestra member, I was a colleague of the principal singers onstage...and years after had many relationships with them, not the least of which was a student-teacher relationship with mezzo Markella Hatziano, and later for several years, mezzo Mignon Dunn whom I met during Di Domenica’s The Balcony. Steven Larson who was a pianist-coach and Markella's future husband (though we didn't know it at the time), dug a flower bed in my backyard calling it the Big Butt because honestly that's exactly what it looked like! John Moulson, Veronica Kinces and crazy Ray Herincx were guests at my home for dinner, and then much later after I began singing John opened his home to me in Berlin even as he lay dying in the hospital..this we didn't know at the time but his wife Magda told me later. I asked why on earth? And she said, John really liked you and told me he wanted to make sure to help you when you were here for auditions with a place to stay! God Bless him...God bless them all ... my family.
Moving back to the atmosphere of the orchestral scene there...it was always met with conflict. There was always a thermometer that inevitably read too low in rehearsals (because it was) and there was always the inbred fighting and hushed gossip. I had made some powerful enemies during these years by merely being present on the freelancing scene and working at OCB. Two flutists in particular who were playing there at the time, Susan Downey, who has long since left town, and Cathy O' Donnell, who still plays quite a bit in town today, were particular enemies. There was their 'constant whisper' and extremely unfriendly behavior. I suppose I can more or less understand why now, but at that time I was too naïve to even begin to understand the dynamics of what was going on. My main thoughts were on doing the best job I could and being with my husband. This continued, this cold war, show after show, and eventually they made some obvious mistakes in performance because they were paying more attention to making me miserable than to what they were doing. I didn't say anything to anyone, but was later called in to see Sarah upstairs in her messy fourth floor office. In retrospect, I suppose she saw what they were doing to me as far as their behavior, something I was trying to deal with and even win them over at the time (Yes, I was really this stupid at this point, still thinking I could make friends with them). She told me that she didn't like the girls that were playing with me and that she was unhappy with their performance. "Give me a name", she said. I told her I really didn't know anyone, and to pleaded not to put me in that position but to ask Ozzie McConathy, the orchestra contractor. She said, “Just give me a name of someone you would like to play with.” She continued to press me and I had no choice but to give her the name of someone I had met, if only briefly, mind you. And that is who I "recommended". It was, as it turns out, a very felicitous choice, as that person is a great friend of mine even today. This was the big "beginning of the end" of any hope for me to freelance in town, as these two women began to take their frustrations out on me by telling everyone that I had them fired, which I’m sure they probably believed. Noel wanted me to tell the truth to them, and I answered saying it wouldn't do any good, which at the time was right, it wouldn't have. Years passed and I was too weak to tell the truth. I kept my silence.
1984, my second season at OCB, and Noel’s fourth, showed much promise that fell apart when Sarah took terribly ill. Tales of Hoffman was the season opener which went on with Neville Dove, Sarah’s assistant conductor, leading the orchestra and Herbert Bliss directing. At this time, Noel and I had contracts exclusively with OCB, and when the Board of Directors decided to cancel the greater part of that season, all contracts were correspondingly cancelled, and both our incomes were erased.
The news of being laid-off came to all of us as a shock. I remember we had planned a dinner that night, and once we heard, we asked Neville to come over for dinner, that we were having “Laid-off Sqausage.” It was made with butternut squash and sausage, and believe it or not I still have the recipe! I just made it up from what we had in the house! Indeed, I was now a family member of that singers’ community. I was certainly not a part of the freelancers’ community which was now free of those contracts at OCB and ready to accept gigs elsewhere. There were, however, no jobs for me! Every actor knows that he must wait on a few tables, and every singer in New York knows that into every life a temp job must fall! During that terrible year I got my job at the supermarket - it was the only thing I knew to do as I did it all through high school to help make ends meet. I remember clearly checking out one of my colleagues who I had supposedly 'gotten fired.’ I felt pretty humiliated. I see now it was only a small detour on my road of success and adventure. I now have opportunities like the people I admired back in the day on that stage, and I am now singing with some of the greatest conductors and some of the most wonderful orchestras in the country. But how did I get there? Wasn't it Sarah who gave me that chance? Indeed she did, and you will see how that happened.
Noel began temping as a secretary in Boston, teaching himself the skills on the computer that he needed in record time, and most of the time 'on the job'. He is an unbelievably intelligent man, and because he loves a challenge and loves to learn, he did it with aplomb! He also began looking at other horizons and musical possibilities for himself. He put himself 'out there', 'on the line' and once we had our feet back on the ground enough financially he began auditioning and getting a career beyond the OCB, already having sung in Paris in his European debut with conductor Hans Graf (now a great friend and mentor of mine as I have sung with him many times also), where Noel was singing the Count Almaviva in Barber of Seville at the Opéra Comique opposite Suzanne Mentzer, Gabriel Bacquier and Ruggero Raimondi. He also had made auditions all over Europe and had garnered several wonderful leading roles at Welsh National Opera stretching several seasons from 1987 to 1991. During those years, I managed to still have a few flute friends and put together a meager bit of playing and some teaching. I had begun singing for fun again - I actually never stopped.
It was nothing short of a miracle that Sarah recovered and even gained a kind of vibrant health she may never have known earlier in her life. With her back, OCB came back to life, and our hopes and aspirations were renewed. I had my only job back again, but for how long?
During that time there was an Aïda where I became closer to Markella Hatziano who was singing Amneris and who had sung Suzuki in an earlier production of Madama Butterfly around 1985 or so. Markella was the one actually that was the catalyst for having me begin to sing in earnest again. She told me her teacher and mentor had died and she had ‘the bug’ more or less to teach me. She said, "I like your laugh, you could SING"! Noel and I laughed, because I could, I HAD! But not in earnest and not for YEARS! Oh yeah, there was the odd evening at home with a bottle of wine and a recording of Butterfly where Noel and I would sing the love duet with me screaming the soprano high notes as best as I could (which sounded good to me through the mask of Bordeaux) and the occasional idea to audition for Opera New England for Cherubino in Marriage of Figaro which I actually did for Sarah and then eventually for Lisi Oliver (Sarah's assistant stage director at the time, with more stories about Sarah than probably almost anyone, I’m sure). I sang for her with Sarah's blessing, but nothing ever really came out of it, which was fine, since I regarded singing as like, well, collecting stamps: grand hobby that someone did purely for the fun of it. This was something that I did that was 'like my husband' whom I adored and something we could do for fun to bond us together; after all, I had my job at the OCB playing flute. Or did I?
In 1988, The Russian Festival in Boston heralded in a new crop of people. Osbourne McConathy was no longer in charge of hiring players, and I'll never know why he was replaced by a man named Bruce Creditor. He was someone who was, in my world, part of the "outside world" where I held a lifetime position on the Blacklist. This was the time when the musicians at the OCB orchestra finally made the most money with more performances in the shortest period of time. It was also the time that I was completely out. I had lost my foothold with Ozzie out of the picture and eventually Sarah wanted to see me, yet again in her messy and mysterious office upstairs. I went in and spilled out the whole story about the Union debacle, the blacklisting and the supposed firing, something I had never divulged to anyone but my husband. She told me she was sorry but after holding it in all those years I was very, very angry. We fought at this point and it was a serious one. Sarah cried and was genuinely hurt. I had hurt her by simply telling her the truth, a truth which, in her world, was not part of her reality and because she had not been aware of it, she had allowed it to hurt someone she cared about. I think this is more why she cried than anything. She told me she was sorry and would make it up to me but by then it was too late. Too much time had passed, too many jobs had been offered and there was nothing left. Nothing but a performance of Shchedrin's Anna Karenina which Sarah immediately had me put into. This was riveting, as Shchedrin's wife, the great prima ballerina Plisetskaya, was dancing the lead. I think many of my colleagues were thinking of their jobs and how they were now all set at the OCB, now that I had more or less been vanquished and thinking of how to make sure I stayed that way. I however was thinking of the experience of watching her dance at her age, well past that of any normal ballerina today, it was just unbelievable; and also because as I saw it, it was perhaps my last performance as a flutist with anything connected with OCB.
Eventually the performances and the operas dwindled at the OCB. Ozzie came back when the Russian Festival was over and, thankfully, I continued to be hired up until the very end.
Wars came and wars went. And the famous ‘Frozen Cavalier’ sabotage happened when Robert Cannon (general director at the time, I believe) was in cahoots with Peter Sellars and Craig Smith and were trying their best, from what we were told later, to take over from Sarah. The heat was turned off intentionally, and someone somehow got it back before the performance. It really never warmed up enough, even though Rosenkav is a good three hours long – the building was just too large and I remember even the audience was shivering. Of course, in those days nobody in the orchestra even suspected foul play – it was a normal occurrence to rehearse or play in there and then not be able to get warm for days. Dame Gwyneth Jones came to sing the Marschalin in that Der Rosenkavalier and I will never forget her peeking down into the pit and saying to me “your flute sound is so beautiful, you know you play like you are a singer”. Little did I know that this was only the beginning.
Oddly, the last show that was done there was The Balcony, something which did not call for any flutes. The OCB did go for another round or two, performing a bit more until ultimately, the music died at the Savoy, something that, at that time, we didn't know would be forever.
But something happened in 1990. After that time, studying only briefly with Markella had given me a serious look at the possibilities of a career in singing and the chance had come for me to step forward. Lessons with Markella, even though my first one was in the dressing room at the Opera House, were at her apartment in Boston and they were a combination of eating fests and singing lessons. She is Greek and believed that one must be well fed in order to sing well! So before each lesson I would have the obligatory (and very large as she dished it out for an army of one) pile of the most wonderful home-made pastitio. It was then that I began to grow my voice, AND myself (something which I had to remedy years later!) Lessons were hard and she willed and pounded at me to sing bigger and bigger! In her play screamed voice (which was always very quiet anyway), "Like an opera singer, Gigi. SING!" "MORE! MORE!" I would leave and my body would ache and collapse under me. I was bodily tired for days afterward. Clearly my unconditioned frame which seemed just fine for flute playing was not going to hold up what we later discovered was quite a big voice that had grown unattended, without my knowledge, much like a beautiful but unruly weed in a deserted garden!
There was now nothing there to hold me at home in Boston.
orchestra, and in the children's version with piano where I was to sing Third Lady and Papagena, and of course "play" the part of the Magic Flute since there was no orchestra. This was an amazing experience. There I was, singing with some of my beloved friends that I had come to admire from the pit that I thought of as colleagues were truly my colleagues now – Evelyn Petros, Jim Rensink and many others. There I was playing one of the parts I had seen Markella, my teacher at the time and someone I truly admired, play on the main stage. Here I was, doing it, even in the same costumes as I watched them parade around in with those large Victoria's Secret-like feather wings!
Not too long after followed another ONE tour, this time of Hansel and Gretel. The director of the production had asked for me to audition for the Witch and Mother. It was George Kott, singer, chorister and funny man extraordinaire who also staged our Magic Flute. He’s the husband of Sandy Kott who played violin for years in the OCB’s orchestra pit with me. George was Sarah's directing assistant on some main stage productions and I went to sing it for him and Sarah. Sarah was worried, she confessed later, because the part was so high and so dramatic, but 
it was a big smash and we did over 20 of them on the road, reduced and cut up, at horridly obscene hours of the morning for school children. It was an experience that later served me well, as years later I was engaged in Milwaukee Florentine Opera to sing the Mother, and when the Witch was unable to complete her contract, I stepped in and learned the staging in one day, going on to do all the performances. It was George's (and Sarah')s ideas that were on the stage in Milwaukee those evenings. They had helped me create what Sarah had once referred to me as “a sexy, horrible kind of character!”
As time went on, and even before that in those early years, there were many evenings with dinners at Sarah's Lincoln residence underneath her covered canopy on the lawn. Our meal one evening was Veal Tonnato and we had white wine from the most fascinating wine dispenser that she called a Weinhaeber. Of course, I had to have one, and eventually did get one in Germany. I remember as a poor young person wanting a large TV upon seeing it at her house. Well, it wasn't particularly "large", but it certainly was bigger than the little 13-incher at my house. She actually gave it to me on loan because she'd "never seen anyone love a TV so much in her life!" I remember home-cooked ham dinners for Easter and beautiful Christmas dinners. Jim Morgan always had a special touch in decor with flowers or some other lovely bit of greenery from the garden either summer or winter.
I remember getting stranded on the road in between NY and home on the way back from my Santa Fe apprentice auditions in NY. It was freezing cold and our car stopped around exit 30 something on I-95....miles from home in the middle of the night...we spent the night shivering in the car with nothing but full credit cards and a few cents to share a cup of coffee at the truck stop. When dawn broke, not knowing who else to call, we called Sarah who gave her credit card number to the service station so that we could get our car fixed and get home. I remember they wouldn't take it at first and it was a Getty station and then she started telling them that she knew Gordon Getty and that they better fix our car! I remember remarking that they probably didn't know Gordon Getty from SPAghetti, but they did fix it eventually and, thanks to Sarah, we got back home! Why we didn't think to call her before that I don't know, because I know she would have helped us get a to a hotel for a warm place to stay, too.
I remember the years that we went to Russia.
Over the years, we continued our trips to Russia and we continued our friendship. All in all, I did the Debussy, a Verdi Requiem, an opera concert which included the final duet from Carmen with my husband, and a Christmas/Chanukah concert with Morton Shames, a cantor and wonderful singer who had known Sarah for years. His son Jonathan had conducted at the OCB and is an insanely talented pianist, conductor and musician!
Later it was Sarah's pilgrimage to Arkansas her homeland that also brought our family members far and wide to teach there, Richard Crist full-time directing with her and teaching voice, and Noel, Sarah Reese and Jim Billings part-time teaching lessons and Master Classes, and various other people in and out.
Eventually moving home to New England, Sarah settled in Freeport, Maine, and it was there that my sad memories are at seeing her, knowing that things would never be the same. Up until almost the end she talked of returning to Russia and doing concerts. Of course, this was impossible and our 'lunch trips' to Maine to see her were about all what all of us at the time could handle.
Those earlier years of hoping that the OCB would come back flew by without hope or results or consequence, and the years of absence in the building led to our music and things being moved to another location, where I remember helping sorting through piles of orchestra parts and scores in a dusty room in a building down the street from the Opera House façade, a sad wreck of what had become the 'eviction' from our 'home'. The years rapidly flew by and eventually wore away that façade painted lovingly by Herbert Senn and Helen Pond, longtime friends and set designers of Sarah’s. We would drive by when we were in town, just to see what it looked like, remarking how it was dirty, faded and still. Our sadness grew as we knew it would never come back the way it was. Even now, looking upon the marvelously reconstructed building restored to its brilliance as it was in the years even before Sarah, we see the bright marquis announcing Phantom of the Opera, The Lion King and other traveling 'wonders of Broadway', and traveling Presenters’ 'trophies' that are installed for a temporary stint, and we stare looking at it even more blankly as it if were as dilapidated and urine-ridden as before. Though it was broken down in our years, it had a certain romance and beauty. It is that thing in 'theater', the thing that is real, be it an ugly truth, a dysfunctional but loving family, or an injustice that has yet to be put right, that is the 'draw'. It is, like the car accident that we can't help but watch, the visceral reality of creating something without thought for the conventional consequences and the blind faith when all hope seems gone that success is just around the corner that we yearn for, like the passion of a lover gone mad: those great creators whose very life depends on that 'creating' without which they would rather die. We go to see reality, either the reality of the show or the person's reality that is creating it. For you, dear readers, this is my reality. It may not be yours. But these are the facts. It is up to you to create your own reality, and I hope for your sake it can even be one one-millionth as valuable and exciting and fulfilling as Sarah's reality was for her. As for the Opera House, we are not drawn there anymore, because even with all the glitz and glamour of "going on with the show" in the theater (which is still oddly now called the Boston Opera House even though there is no real Boston Opera any more), the real soul and breath that once breathed life in the building is dead with no hope of returning, as it is with many eras, golden and vibrant, that come and go but are always remembered.
