Opera star Robert Rounseville and BSO violinist Sheldon Rotenberg and composer Ray Coniff were taught by her music teacher, who was a graduate of the New England Conservatory.
As a young woman she shifted from cello to classical singing, and sought the best training available in Boston, New York City, and Providence, Rhode Island.
Although she devoted more hours over her long life to the production of opera than to her own singing career, and though she was eventually better known as a teacher and director, she always considered herself to be a singer, and continued to give solo vocal performances into the 1970s.
When the faculty of Wheaton College ( Norton, Massachusetts ) formed its own Gilbert and Sullivan troupe in 1945, she became a perennial female lead for about 15 years, and never left the group.
Goodrich won approval to hire a conductor from London's famous Covent Garden in 1940, but this was a far cry from the robust opera department that he conceived.
The gas rationing of 1943 reduced Tanglewood to a simple red cross benefit concert in the Lennox public library, but this wasn't the entire reason for the leanness of opera in those years.
By the time Goldovsky and Koussevitsky were reinvigorating Boston high culture in the forties, the building had fallen into the hands of a theatre chain who saw no profit in its original purpose.
For about forty years afterward, the perennial fulfillment of Boston's operatic aspirations was accomplished by under-financed, under-accommodated devotees in shifting and uncertain circumstances.
When Caldwell successfully created and staged a new production of La Finta Giardiniera in Goldovsky's shop, she believed she was left out of the tour because she was a woman.
Tanglewood allowed women who sought to become leaders in the field of music, and men who respected them, to work together in a non commercial setting where artistic development was the primary concern.
Another male advocate in the Boston Symphony Orchestra / Tanglewood community was Pettitt's lifelong friend, violinist Sheldon Rotenberg, who was hired by Koussevitsky in 1948, and stayed with the BSO until 1991.
Van Cliburn's 1958 victory in the first quadrennial Tchaikovsky piano competition in Moscow won him a ticker tape parade in Manhattan, among other things.
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.
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.
By 1964, Mrs Pettitt was able to incorporate members of the Boston Ballet company into her production of Song Of Norway, an opera about the famous European composer, Edvard Grieg (Providence Journal, November 8, 1964).
Her later productions still included works by Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, Donizetti, Johann Strauss, in addition to Offenbach, Bizet, Lehár, and Britten.
But as her confidence and appetite grew, and emboldened by applause, she gradually opened the repertoire to less familiar composers, like Boito, Smetana, Massenet, Gounod and others.
After more than a dozen years of experience, the Chaminade Opera Group was reaching new heights in the 1970s, recruiting well established professionals and receiving praise in the press.
Turnout was often standing room only, and the group was forced to add extra performances to accommodate the rising interest (Attleboro Sun Chronicle, December 7, 1973).
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.
[45] "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.
"[46] 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.
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 1940s, 1950s and 1960s along with stars Phyllis Curtin, George Shirley, Sherrill Milnes, Rosalind Elias, Justino Diaz and John Moriarty) lionized Mrs Pettitt and her company for their efforts in the 1990 production.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She has sung at Vienna, in Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles and Venice, inter alia; She sang with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Michael Duarte, a longtime friend and collaborator of Mrs Pettitt's, and a lead in several of her productions, is expected to take her place within Chaminade Opera as director.