Love Quote by Sarah Caldwell

Opera is the art form that punishes lone geniuses. Sarah Caldwell’s line lands because it treats collaboration not as a polite virtue but as a survival mechanism: opera is “endurable or successful” only when the people making it actively want one another in the room. The phrasing is telling. “Process” shifts attention away from the glamorous opening night myth and toward the grind - rehearsals, revisions, compromises, egos, budgets, unions, illness, and time. “Endurable” admits what insiders rarely say out loud: opera can be miserable. “Successful” keeps the bar high: the goal isn’t merely to finish, but to make something that works.

Caldwell, a pioneering American conductor and founder of Boston Opera Company, is speaking from the trenches of an art form where no single person can brute-force coherence. Opera requires singers, orchestra, conductor, director, stage managers, designers, chorus, crew - and a thousand micro-negotiations about tempo, breath, blocking, sightlines, diction, and money. Her subtext is managerial and moral at once: love to collaborate is the antidote to the diva narrative. Not “tolerate,” not “allow,” but love - an emotional commitment to shared authorship.

There’s also a quiet rebuke here to the prestige economy around opera, which can reward dominance and celebrity. Caldwell reframes the status game: the real test isn’t how loudly you assert your vision, but whether you can sustain a collective one. In a field built on monumental spectacle, she argues that the most radical ingredient is basic, practiced generosity.