MELODY WILSON
mezzo soprano
With her warm, richly timbred voice, mezzo soprano Melody Wilson has quickly made a name for herself in the USA and Europe.
In 2023-24, she makes important debuts at Carnegie Hall with Mozart’s Requiem as well as with the Lyric Opera of Chicago as Mary in Der fliegende Holländer and with Atlanta Opera as Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She also performs Rossweisse in Die Walküre with Dallas Symphony and Sanctuary Road at the Bach Festival in Orlando.
Last season, she joined the ensemble of the Metropolitan Opera as cover for Cousin Blanche in Champion and returned to Seattle Opera for Fricka in Das Rheingold. She also performed a staged version of Sanctuary Road at the Penn Square Music Festival and Fenena with Washington Concert Opera. Concert appearances included the world premiere of Bodies On the Line by Martin Rokeach with Oakland Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth with Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra.
In 2022, she appeared with San Francisco Symphony in Brahms’ Alto-Rhapsody, with Dallas Symphony under Maestro Fabio Luisi as Olga in Eugene Onegin, with Oakland Symphony in a recital, with Baltimore Concert Opera as Principessa di Bouillon in Adriana Lecouvreur, with the Princeton Festival as Mrs. Herring, and with Union Avenue Opera as Meg Page in Falstaff. In the fall, she covered two roles at San Francisco Opera: Charmian in Adams’ Anthony and Cleopatra as well as Olga.
Her engagements in 2020 and 2021 included her company debuts with Seattle Opera as Olga, with Indianapolis Opera as Suzuki, and with Cincinnati Opera as Mercédès as well as her return to St. Louis for Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ New Works, Bold Voices program (3 commissioned operas). On the concert stage, she sang Beethoven’s Ninth with Kalamazoo Symphony.
In previous seasons, Melody Wilson 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 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).
Ms. Wilson is also known internationally as a concert soloist and recitalist. She performed Sanctuary Road with Columbus Symphony, Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été with the Slovak State Philharmonic, Beethoven’s Ninth 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 Benacková Competition” in Prague (2016) and the “International Czech and Slovak Competition” (2009). She also won 2nd place 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 lives in Vienna and Philadelphia.
