Having recently handled some strenuous assignments like the antibusing demonstrations, TIME's Boston bureau chief Sandra Burton thought she might have a relatively peaceful time in reporting this week's cover story on Sarah Caldwell. She was soon to discover what the opera impresario means when she asks "200%" of herself and everyone around her. After attending a Caldwell production of The Barber of Seville in Manchester, N.H., Burton had to get up at 5 a.m. the next day to fly with her subject to Mexico City. Caldwell's purpose: to look into Aztec culture for her forthcoming production of Roger Sessions' opera Montezuma.

Caldwell, who had had only one hour of sleep, fortified herself with six cups of coffee and then began digging into all aspects of the

Aztec past. "Is there a sacrificial stone?" she demanded at the National Museum of Anthropology. And when the guide led her to a model of the giant pyramid where human sacrifices had been performed, she wanted to know more: "Where did they put the hearts?" The guide led her to a statue of a crouching lion, which bore on its back a vessel that had once contained the victims' still-beating hearts.

After leaving the museum Burton stuck with Caldwell's rapid pace as she and her entourage swept on into the hills outside the city to discuss with an ethnologist such questions as whether Montezuma's throne would be gothic or bucket-shaped, and whether Mexican Indians did or did not whoop like American Indians.

Then back to the city to find some designers to make costumes for 36 Spanish soldiers, 18 Indian peasants, two dancing girls, eleven sacrificial victims ("They'll be cheap," she remarked, "because they don't wear much"). The next day, Burton again had to get up before dawn because Caldwell wanted to watch the first rays illuminate the Pyramid of the Sun, but when she found the national monument barred, she rushed on to a nearby marketplace. "It's easier to make contact with a foreign civilization through things we are familiar with ourselves," she said. In New York Reporter-Researchers Nancy Newman, Gail Eisen and Heyden White talked to many of Caldwell's associates, and Music Critic William Bender wrote the story. Senior Editor Martha Duffy, an opera buff, delighted in getting the assignment to edit Bender's story (and Staff Writer Joan Downs' accompanying report on women composers and conductors) because she is, as she puts it, a "Caldwell fan." But then, who isn't?

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