Melody Wilson

With her warm, richly timbred voice, mezzo-soprano Melody Wilson has quickly made a name for herself in the USA and Europe.

In 2022, she appears with the San Francisco Symphony in Brahms’ Alto-Rhapsody, with the Dallas Symphony as Olga in Eugene Onegin under Maestro Fabio Luisi, with the Oakland Symphony in Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time under Maestro Leonard Slatkin, and with the Delaware Symphony in a gala concert together with Brian Stokes Mitchell. She also makes her role debuts as Principessa di Bouillon in Adriana Lecouvreur with Baltimore Concert Opera and Mrs. Herring with the Princeton Festival.

Her engagements in 2020-21 included her debuts with Seattle Opera as Olga, with Indianapolis Opera as Suzuki, her return to St. Louis for Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ New Works, Bold Voices program (3 commissioned operas), her company debut with Cincinnati Opera as Mercédès as well as Beethoven’s Ninth with Kalamazoo Symphony.

In previous seasons, she sang Addie in Blitzstein’s Regina with Opera Theatre of St. Louis as well as Fenena in Nabucco and Linda in Lost In The Stars with Union Avenue Opera St. Louis. 2017 saw her performances as Blumenmädchen in the world premiere of Mondparsifal Alpha 1-8, a contemporary adaption of Wagner’s Parsifal under Simone Young with the Wiener Festwochen and the Berliner Festspiele. The year before, she garnered acclaim as Mrs. Miller in Union Avenue Opera’s production of Doubt, for which she was nominated for the St. Louis Theater Circle Awards in the category “Outstanding achievement in opera”. In the 2015-16 season, she made two important European debuts: in Germany at Theater Bremen (Mrs. Sedley in Peter Grimes and Mercédès in Carmen) and in Hungary at the State Opera Budapest (Maddalena in Rigoletto).

No stranger to contemporary repertoire, she performed in John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles with Opera Delaware (Cherubino), Wexford Opera Festival (Opera Quartet) and Opera Theatre of St. Louis (Opera Quartet). As a Gerdine Young Artist, she also covered Denyce Graves in the role of Emelda in the world premiere of Terence Blanchard’s opera Champion with Opera Theatre of St. Louis. In the standard repertoire, she performed Zweite Dame in Die Zauberflöte, Flora in La Traviata, Kate in The Pirates of Penzance and Strawberry Woman in Porgy and Bess, all with Opera Delaware, Mercédès in Carmen, Frau Reich in Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor and Suzuki (cover) in Madama Butterfly with Opera North as well as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lucretia in The Rape of Lucretia, Sesto in La clemenza di Tito, Marcellina in Le nozze di Figaro and Larina in Eugene Onegin at the University of Michigan.

Ms. Wilson is also known internationally as a concert soloist and recitalist. She performed Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été with the Slovak State Philharmonic, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and the Kennett Square Symphony, Haydn’s Theresienmesse with the Wexford Opera Festival Orchestra and Vienna’s Consortium Musicum, as well as Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli and Schubert’s Mass No. 3 in b-flat major, again with the Consortium Musicum. She was a featured soloist in Las voces de Montserrat Caballé in Zaragoza, Spain, and in The Sacred Music of Duke Ellington at the Wilmington Jazz Festival, and has presented solo recitals at the U.S. Embassy in Bratislava, the Weidner Center for the Performing Arts in Wisconsin and the Barocksaal Vienna.

Melody Wilson is a five-time recipient of the Jessye Norman Fellowship and a winner of the “Gabriela Beňačková Competition” in Prague (2016) and the “International Czech and Slovak Competition” (2009). She also won 2nd places at the “Irma M. Cooper International Voice Competition” (2014) and the “Annapolis Vocal Competition” (2012). She received awards from the “Austrian American Society of Delaware”, and was one of the winners of the “Kennett Symphony Orchestra Voice Young Artist Competition”. Ms. Wilson holds undergraduate degrees in Music and Spanish from the University of Delaware and a Master of Music and a specialist degree (Artist Diploma) from the University of Michigan. She splits her time between Vienna and Philadelphia.