Mezzo-soprano Melody Wilson has gained recognition as an accomplished operatic artist in the United States and Europe, equally celebrated in classic and contemporary repertory. Praised for her “rich voice and great acting chops” (St Louis Post-Dispatch), her “smoky mezzo-soprano and stately deportment” (Opera News), and her “beautiful voice and well-honed technique” (San Francisco Classical Voice), she’s been hailed for performances that “reign supreme” (St Louis Magazine), for her “ruby timbre” (OperaWire) and for her “fine comic work” (Broadway World). She appeared on Opera America Magazine’s winter 2024 cover as Fricka in Das Rheingold.

 

Extraordinary versatility characterizes Wilson’s career. Though a natural Zwischenfach mezzo, her skillset transcends conventional fach. Wilson has sung roles ranging from contralto, such as Gaea in Strauss’ Daphne, to nearly-contralto such as Eugene Onegin’s Olga, to the low soprano role of Musiel in Damien Geter’s Loving v. Virginia. Highly proficient in opera’s diverse linguistic and musical landscape, she performs in German, Russian, and English repertoire just as comfortably as in Italian and French.

 

After Daphne’s Gaea at Seattle Opera, 2026 brings a debuts in a apex mezzo-soprano role, Saint-Saëns’ Dalila (Union Avenue Opera). In Seattle she also reprises one of her most-performed roles, Carmen’s bestie Mercedes (Cincinnati Opera, Opera North, Theater Bremen), and gives a recital including excerpts of Samson et Dalila and Carmen and an African-American spiritual. In 2024, Wilson role-debuted in another pillar of mezzo-soprano repertory, Amneris in Verdi’s Aida (UAO).

In staged opera, she has appeared in Wagner all over the United States, making her Lyric Opera of Chicago debut as Mary in Der Fliegende Holländer, and returning to Seattle Opera as Fricka (Das Rheingold) and to the Dallas Symphony as Roßweiße in Die Walküre. She made a more unusual Wagnerian outing as a Blumenmädchen in the world premiere of Mondparsifal Alpha 1-8, Jonathan Meese’s adaption of Wagner’s Parsifal (Wiener Festwochen and the Berliner Festspiele). She has performed Olga in Eugene Onegin widely, including her house debuts at Seattle Opera and with the Dallas Symphony. Puccini offers scant work for mezzo-sopranos, but she has excelled as Suzuki in Madama Butterfly (Indianapolis Opera, Opera Baltimore, Opera Delaware). In Verdi, in addition to Amneris, she has appeared as Fenena in Nabucco (Washington Concert Opera), Meg Page in Falstaff (UAO), and Maddalena in Rigoletto (Hungarian State Opera). She gave fine work as the Principessa di Bouillon in Adriana Lecouvreur (Opera Baltimore). Other standard rep roles have included 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), and Frau Reich in Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor (Opera North).

Wilson has made great impressions too in contemporary opera and 20C opera. Moravec’s Sanctuary Road has also been staged as an opera (Lancaster Symphony). With Christine Brewer, she performed Mrs. Miller in Douglas Cuomo’s Doubt (Union Avenue Opera). Another career highlight was Addie in Blitzstein’s Regina to Susan Graham’s Regina (Opera Theatre of St. Louis), with Opera News noting, “Melody Wilson’s brought depth to Addie.”. She covered Cousin Blanche at the Metropolitan Opera in Terence Blanchard’s Champion, and at OTSL she also covered Denyce Graves as Emelda in Champion’s world premiere. There too she created the roles of Kyra and the Son in Laura Kaminsky’s On the Edge and Janet Armstrong in Steve Mackey’s Moon Tea. She covered the role of Charmian at San Francisco Opera in John Adams’ new Antony and Cleopatra. And she triumphed as Musiel Byrd Jeter in Loving v Virginia (Virginia Opera).

 

In Britten’s operas, she has also essayed the roles of Mum in Britten’s Albert Herring (Princeton Festival) and made a company debut with The Atlanta Opera as Hermia in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mrs. Sedley in Peter Grimes (Theater Bremen). And Wilson has made several appearances in John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles with Opera Delaware (Cherubino), Wexford Opera Festival (Opera Quartet) and OTSL (Opera Quartet). She stole the show in Weill’s Lost in the Stars as Linda (UAO).

 

Recent seasons featured many standard rep highlights for Wilson in concert, including her Carnegie Hall debut in Mozart’s Requiem Mass, on St. Patrick’s Day 2024. Other concert highlights in recent seasons have included multiple Messiahs (New West Symphony, Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra) and Beethoven 9s (Kalamazoo Symphony, BCO, Hartford Symphony). In 2022, she made her debut with the San Francisco Symphony singing Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody and some spirituals. She has performed Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été (Slovak State Philharmonic), Haydn’s Theresienmesse (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 (Consortium Musicum).

She also performs contemporary concert works, with frequent appearances in Paul Moravec’s oratorio Sanctuary Road (Columbus Symphony, Chatauqua Symphony, Charleston Symphony, Bach Festival of Winter Park). She performed the mezzo role in the world premiere of Martin Rokeach’s oratorio, Bodies on the Line, with the Oakland Symphony. She recently gave recitals at Northwestern College (Iowa) and in Pabianice, Poland. In 2021, with Will Liverman, she sang in I Dream a World, OTSL’s first celebration of Juneteenth, at the Missouri History Museum.

 

Ms. Wilson holds undergraduate degrees in Music and Spanish from the University of Delaware and a Master of Music and an Artist Diploma from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she studied with Shirley Verrett and George Shirley.