Baustian, Robert Frederick (16126186): Difference between revisions

Became Opera Director at the University of Kansas. Robert F. Baustian (4 June 1921 – February 2016) was born in Storm Lake, Iowa. He graduated from East High School in Sioux City in 1938 and received a Bachelor of Music from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester in 1942. He enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in September 1942, trained in the enlisted reserve (radar) near Chicago, entered active service at Fort Custer, Michigan, in September 1943, and completed basic training at Miami Beach. He trained as a German prisoner-of-war interrogator at Camp Ritchie and served in combat with the 4th Infantry Division and the 11th Armored Division in Germany from November 1944 to May 1945. Discharged as a technician fifth grade at Camp Grant, Illinois, in March 1946, he received the Bronze Star. He returned to Eastman for a Master of Music (1948), studied in Zurich, and conducted opera and symphony in Europe and the United States, including as assistant conductor for Gian Carlo Menotti's ''The Consul'' (1950–1951). From 1953 to 1957 he was second conductor at the Hessisches Staatstheater in Wiesbaden. He joined The Santa Fe Opera in its first season (1957) and conducted there through 1977; from 1966 to 1983 he headed conducting at Oberlin Conservatory. He died in February 2016 at age 94.

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