Daily Inspiration Quote by Sarah Caldwell

Caldwell is taking a swing at the most comfortable illusion in classical music: that “great” performance is mostly about faithful repetition. Her line is a rebuke to the museum mindset that can turn opera into a prestige reenactment, where everyone knows the big moments and politely waits for them to arrive. If you enter the hall expecting the same emotional itinerary, you’ll get exactly that: a performance that hits its marks, confirms your expectations, and rarely risks surprise.

The cleverness is in how she frames ignorance as a discipline, not a lack. “As though I didn’t know it” isn’t anti-knowledge; it’s anti-autopilot. Caldwell is talking about behaving like the score is still alive, like the drama could still go off-script even when every note is printed. That posture forces a conductor, singers, and orchestra to listen in real time, not just execute. It also exposes how much operatic “tradition” is really habit: inherited tempos, standard pauses for applause, interpretive tics passed down as correctness.

Context matters: Caldwell made her name in American opera as an entrepreneurial builder, famously mounting ambitious works and carving out space outside Europe’s old-house orthodoxies. For someone who had to invent infrastructure as she went, treating opera as a fixed ritual would have been self-defeating. The subtext is a democratic dare: if you stop treating opera like sacred property and start treating it like volatile theater, it can feel dangerous again - and worth arguing about.