Challenges: A Memoir of My Life in Opera

A powerful pioneer in opera and music recounts her struggles and triumphs

Founder and long-time director of the Opera Company of Boston and the first woman to conduct the Metropolitan Opera, Sarah Caldwell was one of America's best known and most adventurous conductors and opera directors. Her career spanned her wildly successful and innovative productions of classical operas such as Offenbach's Voyage to the Moon, Don Quixote, and Madama Butterfly to projects like "Making Music Together," which in 1988 brought together musicians and composers from the Soviet Union and the United States. Caldwell's work earned her many honorary degrees and she received the National Medal for the Arts from President Clinton in 1997. Challenges is based on a series of interviews Rebecca Matlock conducted over a period of three years before Caldwell's death in 2006. This intimate memoir gives us Caldwell's perceptions in her own unique, indomitable voice.