U.S. female Opera leader Caldwell dead at 82

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Some of the unusual stagings were “not just trying to be different,” she once said. “Many of them grew out of desperate circumstances in which the stage was too small for the sets or such.”

Financial problems virtually shut the Boston company around 1990.

“You know the amount of money you should have — you don’t have it. To stimulate more, you just need to perform,” Caldwell said in a 1996 article in Opera News. “What knocked us out finally was not enough money for both productions and building maintenance. It’s not that we didn’t want to do it — we couldn’t.”

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“The major problem in the arts today is money,” she told U.S. News and World Report in 1979. “Unless we have a remarkable infusion of support, we will not achieve the kind of life in the arts for artists and their audiences that we ought to achieve.”

She remained active, serving in a variety of posts, including principal guest conductor of the Ural Philharmonic in Ekaterinburg, Russia, and the chief organizer of Russian-American cultural exchanges that blended ballet, chamber music, ballads and poetry from the two countries.

She also tried her hand at theater, directing a New York production of “Macbeth” in 1981.

In 1999, she was appointed a distinguished professor of music and led the opera program at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the town where she grew up as a professor’s daughter. She said she would continue to travel to maintain conducting and recording commitments around the world.

When she received a National Medal of the Arts from President Clinton in January 1997, he said, “She’s come a long way from Arkansas, and I’m very proud of her.” He praised her enterprise in bringing “difficult yet beautiful operas to the stage” and developing new audiences for opera.

She was hospitalized for a month in early 2001, though officials declined to say why, citing privacy concerns. She went on unpaid leave from the university and formally retired in 2004.

She had health problems and missed New England, so in 2003 she moved to Freeport, Maine, where she shared a home with Morgan, he said.

Caldwell was born March 6, 1924, in Maryville, Mo., moving to Arkansas when she was about 12. She was a child prodigy in both music and mathematics and studied violin before turning to opera and conducting.

In a 1999 interview in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, she recalled studying in Boston in her 20s with choral conductor Boris Goldovsky. He told her “there was nothing to be afraid of. The fact that I didn’t know anything about opera, I hadn’t studied conducting and I knew very little about the technical aspects of the theater, didn’t matter. He said that everything was learnable.”

Her mother had taught choral music and was a choral conductor, “so it never occurred to me that it was a strange thing for a woman to want to be a conductor,” she said.

There were no immediate survivors, Morgan said. A brother had preceded her in death.

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