Florence Louise Pettitt - Founding of Chaminade Opera Group

Founding of Chaminade Opera Group

In 1958, a year before the founding of the company, Mrs Pettitt directed a limited production of Mozart's "Cosi Fan Tutte" at a small venue, with double piano accompaniment instead of orchestra. The following year she commenced the first official season of the new company with Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel.

During her long tenure Mrs Pettitt served in three roles: orchestra conductor, vocal director and dramatic director. She probably did so for a longer, unbroken period than any other American woman. The difficulty of this challenge was illustrated by Boris Goldovsky, who pursued a career as a conductor before becoming an opera lover. In his first conducting class with Fritz Reiner, he was confronted with the notion that an art form he despised ( Goldovsky as a student loathed opera ) comprised the most difficult and demanding form of conducting.

Reiner reportedly said to Goldovsky in his conducting class at the Curtis Institute: "Anybody can beat time evenly and it's nothing to be proud of...I'm not going to waste your time and mine teaching you easy things. What I'm going to do first is teach you how to conduct operatic recitatives. Because until you've conducted opera, you don't know what conducting really is"( see page 155 "My Road to Opera" by Goldovsky ).

Reiner forced Goldovsky to coach the opera singers at Curtis in operatic repertoire, the better to prepare him to be a great conductor. And Goldovsky dedicated his book to three men: Fritz Reiner, Ernst Lert, and Serge Koussevitzky.

So for Mrs Pettitt to have discharged all three responsibilities ( orchestra director, dramatic director, singing director ) for such a long period of time is a singular and extraordinary achievement.

Thirty two years after the founding of Chaminade, the Taunton Daily Gazette wrote that "Long before Sarah Caldwell in Boston or New York's Beverly Sills directed opera companies, there was Louise Pettitt in Attleboro" (Taunton Daily Gazette, Sat Feb 23, 1991, by Nancy C Doyle ). This praise was half right.

Louise Pettitt preceded Beverly Sills by many years. Sills took over as General Director of the NYCO in 1980.

But Louise was a contemporary of Caldwell.

In Chicago, beginning in 1954, Fox was running the Lyric Opera and engaging artists like Maria Callas. But few women in the US were running opera companies when Mrs Pettitt took the helm of Chaminade, and the consistency of her multiple responsibility is notable. Caldwell herself often did not conduct the orchestra in her independent productions. Perhaps no other woman in America so consistently and enduringly performed both as conductor and director as did Mrs Pettitt.

There were few opera companies at all in the United States in 1958. Of those, there were few founded by women, and of those, there were fewer still with a woman serving as both conductor and dramatic director. She was certainly a leader, and a pioneer.

The New England Conservatory's alumni notes claim that Caldwell was "the second woman ever to conduct the New York Philharmonic (1974), and the third woman ever to lead an American opera company" (see Caldwell alumni profile). Certainly the foundation of a successful opera company in the 1950s by an American woman would have been highly unusual.

The works chosen by Mrs Pettitt for her first four seasons did not stray from the standard canon of favorites. After Hänsel und Gretel, a well-known piece then—with which she and her audience were familiar—the next three seasons were devoted to Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, Magic Flute, and Marriage of Figaro.

Her choices later become more daring and ambitious.