A life in music

Courtesy Richard Lalli ’86MUSAD

Adjunct professor of music Richard Lalli ’86MusAD has been "a tireless spirit for all music at Yale.” View full image

Growing up in a small town outside Chicago, Richard Lalli ’86MusAD and his two older siblings were required by their parents to take piano lessons. “No one in my family really liked music, and my siblings hated the lessons.” But, for him, those lessons were the beginning of a lifelong love—and a 47-year career at Yale that ended with his retirement in June.

By age 14, Lalli was the organist at St. Patrick’s, the local Roman Catholic church, whose school he attended and whose teaching sisters he credits with showing him the wider world. “They talked to me every day about books and politics and music,” he says. They also urged him to attend the National Music Summer Camp in Interlochen, Michigan, where he began taking voice lessons.

He finished high school at Interlochen Arts Academy, then studied as an undergraduate at Oberlin Conservatory. (“I was the early music and art song guy,” he says.) After a master’s degree at Eastern Michigan University, Lalli decided to undertake doctoral studies at the Yale School of Music in 1978.

He never left Yale, where he built a career that combined performance and teaching. After 14 years at the Yale School of Music—teaching performance, keyboard skills, theory, and musicianship—he joined Yale’s Department of Music. Along with teaching courses on the performance of art songs, Lalli led the Yale Collegium Musicum, helped form and lead the Opera Theater of Yale College, initiated Beinecke Library concerts, cofounded and became the first artistic director of the Yale Baroque Opera Project, and developed Yale’s Shen Musical Theater curriculum. He performed as a baritone soloist and sang oratorios, chamber music, and new works, and was a founder and performer with Mirror Visions Ensemble, a company devoted to revitalizing art song programming. 

In 2008, he and his now-husband, physician Michael Rigsby ’88MD (former medical director at Yale Health), were appointed head and associate head, respectively, of Jonathan Edwards College. Lalli suffered a stroke later that year that prevented them from taking the positions and ended his performing career. But he has remained an important part of the music community, says Penelope Laurans, a former head of JE. “Richard, who won the 2007 prize for teaching excellence in the humanities, has continued as a superb teacher and mentor for vocal music and an influential and tireless spirit for all music at Yale.”  

A former student, Grammy-award winning mezzo soprano Annie Rosen ’08, ’12MusM, echoes the sentiment. “Richard Lalli has a gift for helping singers become more than what they already are,” she says, “imparting his astonishing grasp of the musical arts with an irreverence that makes him both approachable and extremely funny. He is one of the people to whom I owe my entire musical career and a great deal of my happiness. Yale will not be the same without him.”