America has lost one of its musical titans. I feel privileged to have experienced music-making, as a student and colleague, and life itself with this man who was so giving of his time and talents–an example to us all to follow in our own way. He was a true original, an artistic bastion for our times–but ultimately, he was not of this century. Rather, he was timeless whose roots, when uncovered from the soils of a Western Iowa upbringing and traced, take us back to the charms of early twentieth-century France, then to the musico-dramatic genius of Mozart’s score autographs scattered across a Viennese billiards table, and further back to the beautiful sonorities wafting in the dust from Monteverdi’s 9 madrigal books at a nobleman’s great hall whose walls are fully adorned with framed chiaroscuro. (Eclectically throw in a Napoleonic candelabra or two.) His didactic philosophies fully embraced the legacy of Western tradition, but he also constantly searched for the new (while often defiant toward current fashions) in his–dare we say–thousands of operatic productions? Opera for him was more than a passion, vocation, or obsession dating back to his boyhood; it was his basis of reality, held as the ultimate expression of human thought and the human condition. I believe this was the center of his pedagogy for every music student. Opera, born from Renaissance rumination, was the wellspring of human expression from which all other musical tributaries, even to this very day, emanate. Above all, his teaching was guided by one master force: love for his fellow human being. Throughout many generations, the countless jewels he tirelessly forged and embedded into each one of his students are carried across this country today in every musical niche imaginable. He achieved immortality. Like many of you, I could share a thousand personal anecdotes as a Simpson student. Orpheus Festival was Larsen’s genius apparatus that fished for wandering, curious sorts like me to take into the hamlet-fold of Indianola. I remember when just after my grandfather died, at camp, he revealed to me the cathartic profundities of emotive, sensitive piano playing in Mozart’s Adagio in b minor. I am grateful for for how he accepted me in all of my eccentricities and recognized in me their inherent value. I fondly recall our 4-hands teaming-up for Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto which led to victory at the Des Moines Symphony Guild competition. Like a second father, he beamed with pride! We both shared a love for Mozart, too. On the 100th anniversary of the composer’s death, I suggested we do a late-night reading of the Requiem following the Lekberg Christmas Party to keep vigil. Larsen agreed, and announced these plans in convocation citing that “if anyone is as crazy as me, it’s Bryan Stanley!” I will wear that badge of honor any day. I will be forever grateful for the opportunities he afforded me, the sprightly young buck who still knew too little, especially when he had DMMO mount an Apprentice Artist production of my one-act opera The Cask of Amontillado. During which, in a coaching of Montresor’s Aria, I vividly remember him, caught up in his own flight of thespian fantasy, throwing himself onto the studio floor and demonstrably writhing around on his Persian area rug like the tortured worm that Poe’s character embodied…Like me, he also appreciated the pre-designed spontaneity for dramatic effect, such as when in the 1994 DMMO lobby reading of Peter Grimes I leapt onto the piano bench with him for the four-hands rendering of “The Storm”….and then there was a January la Boheme morning staging, when he confessed a drowsiness that he couldn’t shake, I suggested we collectively poke our heads into a large snowbank at break. So we did. I enjoy reading everyone’s recollections, and I am so grateful for the blessings of so many lifelong Simpson friends made possible by the islet of creative environ fashioned by his own hand. I want to compose for him a requiem. I will miss him.