About Yale Opera

The Yale Opera program at the Yale University School of Music, led by Artistic Director Doris Yarick Cross, has been extraordinarily successful in preparing singers for active professional careers. Graduates of the program appear on the rosters of all of the world’s major opera houses, including The Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Teatro alla Scala (Milan, Italy), Royal Opera House Covent Garden (London, UK), English National Opera (London, UK), Bayerische Staatsoper (Berlin, Germany), and the Vienna Staatsoper (Austria), among many others.

This success is a result of the extraordinary depth and breadth of the Yale Opera program. Yale Opera not only features a fine studio voice faculty, but provides expert, specialized instruction in the areas of diction, languages, style, acting, and body movement. In addition, with very small and selective classes, all students have the opportunity to perform major roles in productions ranging from opera excerpts with piano to full productions of major works in New Haven’s historic Shubert Theater. Recent Yale Opera productions include Die Zauberflöte, Die Fledermaus, La bohème, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Così fan tutte, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi.

Yale Opera singers have worked with such distinguished artists as stage directors Colin Graham, Marc Verzatt, Francesca Zambello, Christopher Alden, Sam Helfrich, Thor Steingraber, and Vera Calabria; and conductors Giuseppe Grazioli, Federico Cortese, Dominique Trottein, and Jeremy Silver. Frequent master classes by the world’s most renowned artists sharpen students’ interpretive and technical skills. In recent years, guest master class clinicians have included Alan Held, Ann Murray, Renata Scotto, Elly Ameling, Regine Crespin, Sherrill Milnes, and Marilyn Horne.