Ellen Rosand

George A. Saden Professor of Music

Ellen Rosand, B.A. Vassar College, M.A. Harvard University, Ph.D. New York University, faculty member at Yale since 1992. You are one of the towering musicologists of your generation, a lifelong scholar of some of the grandest traditions of vocal music: sixteenth‑ and seventeenth‑century Italian madrigals, Baroque operas by Monteverdi, Cavalli, Vivaldi, and Handel, and much more. You brought to light the musical thought in Venetian academies and the compositions of the leading woman composer of the age. Your pre-eminence in all these areas is internationally recognized for its historical sweep, its impeccable command of sources, and its deep understanding of the Italian artistic heritage. Your writings on seventeenth-century opera are classics in the field, required reading that continues to challenge and reshape our knowledge of the origins and early flowering of Italian opera—and of the genre of opera itself. The latest of these, Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy, weighs boldly into fraught questions of compositional authorship and cultural meaning. Through a meticulous study of the archival sources you shed light on a now-lost opera by Claudio Monteverdi and also reclaim a more robust compositional role for him within major operatic works where this has been long disputed.

You have played leadership roles within the American Musicological Society, where you were the editor‑in‑chief of its flagship journal in the early 1980s and went on to become the society’s president in the 1990s. Here at Yale, you devoted yourself unstintingly toward the sustaining and building of a new Department of Music, particularly during your important years as Chair from 1995 to 1998. You have been a much-loved mentor to generations of dedicated students, and the Department’s current shape and intellectual range are the direct result of your efforts.

On the national musical scene, you have been a musical advisor to the Metropolitan Opera, where you played a central role in planning its 2012 production of The Enchanted Island. You established and for six years have devoted tireless effort to the international critical edition of the operas of Francesco Cavalli, of which you are the General Editor, directing a whole team of co-workers. The world of musical knowledge is much richer, much wiser, and much more humane for your work and distinguished career.

In 2007, you were awarded the Andrew Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award; you used it to found and direct the Yale Baroque Opera Project, which merges exacting scholarship with undergraduate teaching and performance in an annual seventeenth‑century opera production the likes of which can be found at no other university. Anyone who has seen one of these incredible productions—the last, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, just a few weeks ago—has a direct understanding of the way you have made Yale a leader in the sustenance and continuation of baroque opera. In tribute to your astonishingly varied career of historical scholarship, inspiring teaching, and operatic production, the Yale Faculty salutes you in chorus, and, if only it could sing, would regale you with the triumphal march from Aida.

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans