Robert Wayne Bailey ’59

Robert Wayne Bailey ’59 passed away on July 6 in Naples, Florida. He entered Dartmouth from Central High School in Flint, Michigan. At Dartmouth he majored in music and was a four-year member of the Glee Club and the Canterbury Association and a two-year member of the Handel Society. His studies with James Sykes led him to a life-long devotion to the music of the 19th century. He received a Reynolds Foundation fellowship to study piano with Frederich Wührer in Munich. He continued his studies at Princeton University, where he earned an M.F.A. (1963) and a Ph.D. (1971). He joined the music department at Yale in 1964. In 1977 he became a professor at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. While at Eastman he spent a year as a visiting professor at University California Berkeley. In 1988 he became the Petrie Professor of Music at New York University, a position he held until his retirement in 2008. In 1994 he joined the faculty at the Juilliard School, and was still a member at the time of his death. Many of his doctoral students became professors at prestigious institutions. Bob was one of the world’s foremost authorities on the music of Richard Wagner. He never surrendered his love of the piano, performing Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and the Mendelssohn First Piano Concerto with the Eastman-Rochester Philharmonic during his career. His sister Judith Wilson survives him.