Florence Louise Pettitt - Boston Opera in Crisis of 1990: Pettitt Temporarily Takes Mantle From The Faltering Caldwell

Boston Opera in Crisis of 1990: Pettitt Temporarily Takes Mantle From The Faltering Caldwell

Sarah Caldwell's Boston company gradually fell apart, and by 1990, Tanglewood's opera department had long since been pared back by the BSO trustees. Eric Leinsdorf had fired Goldovsky from Tanglewood in the early 1960s, and abolished the opera department there. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that Seiji Ozawa re-introduced opera at Tanglewood on an equal basis with the other genres.

"Sarah's 1989 production of Leonard Bernstein's Mass was her last effort that could be ranked as a piece of innovative theater,...".

"Although buoyed by the success of Mass, by the time 1990 rolled around, Sarah was on the cusp of her last Boston season, her company tottering on the edge of financial ruin with little hope of rescue."

See an explanation of her difficulties in "Sarah Caldwell, Indomitable Director of the Opera Company of Boston, Dies at 82" article by Anthony Tommasini, New York Times March 25, 2006.

The last performance of her company in its own theater was June 17, 1990. Her theatre was shuttered for building code violations in December 1990.

By this point Mrs Pettitt's company—a more enduring institution—found itself thriving in Boston. In January of that year, the Boston Opera Company (not Caldwell's "Opera Company of Boston") featured Mrs Pettitt's production of Bizet's Pearl Fishers in the Strand Theater in Boston.

With the support of the City of Boston, the federal Economic Development Administration, and Community Development Block Grant money, the Strand was saved and renovated in the late '70s. While Boston City Hall backed revitalization of the Strand, with help from community groups, it has not been primarily used as an opera house since the re-opening. But when the Caldwell organization faltered, it provided shelter to the Chaminade group.

Richard Dyer, the eminent Globe columnist who presided at New England Conservatory's 2008 centennial of Boris Goldovsky (recounting tales of Boston Opera from the '40s, '50s and '60s along with international stars Phyllis Curtin, George Shirley, Sherrill Milnes, Rosalind Elias, Justino Diaz and local luminaries such as John Moriarty and many others) lionized Mrs Pettitt and her company for their efforts in the 1990 production.

Among the professional performers onstage in the 1990 Pettitt production was Deborah Sasson (ibid). Deborah was born in Boston, and having worked with Mrs Pettitt and Seiji Ozawa, she has moved on to become a celebrated European performer.

Pettitt's collaborators that year included Randall J. Kulunis, who at the time saw the failure of the Caldwell efforts and the loss of Caldwell's venue an as an opportunity to resurrect the original plans of the original Huntington Street Boston Opera House (1909) and put fully staged opera once again in a proper Boston hall. Pettitt's company cooperated in this noble venture, although no resurrection occurred. Dyer hailed the effort.

In the narrative of Boston Opera history, this may have been the highwater mark for Mrs Pettitt and her Chaminade group. But she continued using Boston singers in her productions for many more years, and continued to draw on the Boston Opera community for talent, ticket sales, inspiration, and collaboration.

Not only did she and her Chaminade Opera Group continue staging operas long after the folding of Caldwell's company, but they also established a broad repertoire of oratorio works, including Mendelssohn's Elijah, Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, and many famous and lesser known requiems and masses. Her favorite requiem was Brahms' German Requiem and Chaminade Opera Group singers performed it several times as an oratorio piece under the direction of Mrs Pettitt. They also founded an opera scholarship.

Perhaps it was her longevity or reputation—or successes—that finally brought a representative of the New York Times to review a night of her work, toward the twilight of her sixty years in musical performance. But the Times was really unprepared to measure her pioneering efforts and her service to the popular propagation of high culture in America. Nor were they even prepared to review the creative and artistic innovations of her career. Anthony Tommasini, the great New York Times expert—who literally wrote the (best-selling) book on opera—reviewed a belabored production of hers in the 1990s and found it charming, and warm, but riddled with weakness. The semi-professional tenor had a weak high range. The woodwinds seemed "under-rehearsed." Mr Tommasini could not recommend that particular show to his readers, and evinced incognizance of both her early role as a pioneering woman and her long regional importance in fostering generations of experienced singers.

Mrs Pettitt was by then in her late seventies, and American opera was no longer the desolate wilderness of so many years before. The catalogues of companies, stars, venues and repertoires had become lengthy, surfeited. She had always provided probative opportunity on evidence of good faith where she witnessed promising talent in league with high enthusiasm. In the case of Sasson and others, the opportunity was well requited. On a budget of almost zero, working long hours for no pay, in a nonprofit, in the interest of promoting unproven ability, it would be inappropriate to judge her efforts by the performance standards of the Metropolitan Opera, or La Scala. And yet, having pioneered the introduction of fully staged opera into the mainstream of civic life in America, and having done so without supportive academic incubation (like by Boston University for Caldwell) or prolonged mentoring (like Goldovsky for Caldwell) during a time when American women were effectively barred from leadership in all fields, Mrs Pettitt found herself finally surrounded by the field of well supported competitors she had always sought to engender (the same is true for Goldovsky, who made such a case in his memoir: see Boris Goldovsky), and still refused to deny opportunity to the unproven, and the unfinished. Mr Tommasini sought to judge her narrowly, within the facile intellectual confines of mere technical pedantry. He was truly unqualified to take her measure.

Although age and illness (particularly that of her lifelong love George Arthur Pettitt) gradually began to affect her productiveness in the new millennium, she maintained an incontrovertible optimism and resolve. Her teaching and rehearsal schedules exhibited the same relentless diligence as previously. On the day she died, she was awaiting several voice students, and was three weeks into a six week schedule for an upcoming choral concert (supporting Chaminade).

She died on March 25, 2006 at her home in Massachusetts, about ten weeks after her partner of 65 years. She outlived Sarah Caldwell—a very similar woman—by exactly two days. An archive of her work and that of the Chaminade Opera Group is being assembled under the auspices of Wheaton College, Norton Massachusetts.