Richard Pearlman, 68; Opera Director Trained Young Singers

Richard Pearlman, 68, who groomed and launched young singers as director of Chicago’s Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, died Saturday of cancer at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said Lyric spokeswoman Susan Mathieson Mayer.

Before taking the Lyric post in 1995, Pearlman served from 1976 to 1995 as director of the Eastman Opera Theatre at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where his students included soprano Renee Fleming.

“The first thing you have to ask yourself in auditioning singers,” Pearlman said in “Fortissimo,” a 2005 book about the Lyric center, “is whether this is a sound people would pay money to hear. If they don’t have that, what’s the point?”

Born in Norwalk, Conn., and raised in Tucson, Pearlman graduated from Columbia University. He served as an apprentice to composer Gian Carlo Menotti, as well as to directors Franco Zeffirelli, Luchino Visconti and Tyrone Guthrie.

Before turning to the training of singers, Pearlman established a name for himself as a director of operas, particularly in new and unusual works. He was a staff director at New York’s Metropolitan Opera from 1964 to 1967, and served as general director of the former Washington Opera in Washington, D.C., from 1968 to 1970.