Richard Lalli

Professor Adjunct of Music

Richard Lalli, BM, Oberlin Conservatory of Music; DMA, Yale University; faculty member at Yale since 1982: It is difficult to describe in a limited number of words all that you have given to make the Yale halls ring with music.

As a performer, you participated extensively in concerts of solo song repertoire, oratorio, chamber music, and new works around the globe. After fourteen years in Yale’s School of Music—where you taught singing, keyboard skills, theory, and musicianship—you joined the Department of Music. And Yale College has never been the same.

Over time, along with your highly regarded courses on vocal performance, you led the Yale Collegium Musicum, helped form and lead the Opera Theater of Yale College, initiated majestic Beinecke Library concerts using the library’s rare materials, cofounded and became the first artistic director of the Yale Baroque Opera Project, and spearheaded the Shen Curriculum for Musical Theater at Yale—a stunning list of contributions to musical life at the university.

But even that impressive list cannot convey the spirit of what you have contributed. As a vocal teacher you have been maestro, counselor, and guide, teaching students musical discipline, rigor, and taste. You gave them experience in class recitals and challenging productions through your legendary course, The Performance of Vocal Music. Many of them have been accepted into distinguished graduate programs and now have full-fledged careers around the nation at places such as the Metropolitan Opera, the Chicago Lyric Opera, and many more. Your former students have even formed opera companies, including the recently-launched Park City Opera in Utah—we should all go!

Along the way, your productions, such as Dido and Aeneas and Four Saints in Three Acts, impressed and delighted Yale and New Haven audiences. For all of your superior teaching, in 2006 you were awarded the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities.

In 2008 you and your husband, Michael Rigsby, were appointed as the Heads of College for Jonathan Edwards College. Although medical circumstances prevented you from taking up these appointments, without missing a musical beat you have continued as a superb teacher and mentor for vocal music and an influential and tireless imaginative spirit for all music at Yale.

As you retire, entering the catalogue of wonderful musicians who have made Yale a universe of music, your colleagues join in singing Handel’s “Hallelujah” to you and hope that all on this campus who cherish music will find ways to continue your splendid legacy.