Stephen Wadsworth

Stephen Wadsworth has been the James S. Marcus Faculty Fellow and director of the Artist Diploma in Opera Studies program at Juilliard since 2008. He has directed spoken theater on and off Broadway, in London’s West End, and in the American regional theater as well as opera at the Metropolitan Opera (Rodelinda, Iphigénie en Tauride, Boris Godunov), La Scala, Vienna State Opera, London’s Royal Opera, Netherlands Opera, Edinburgh Festival, San Francisco Opera, Los Angeles Opera, and many others. Over three decades, he has directed 11 productions at Seattle Opera, including Wagner’s Ring cycle. His productions of classic plays by Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Molière, Marivaux, Beaumarchais, and Goldoni––often in his own landmark translations––have established him as a master of classical style. His books Marivaux: Three Plays and Molière: Don Juan are published by Smith and Kraus; the government of France named him a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for services to French literature. He wrote the Grammy-nominated A Quiet Place with Leonard Bernstein; in 2022, it became the first American opera ever produced by the Paris Opera. He is co-author of the operas Amelia (music by Daron Hagen) and The Flood (music by Korine Fujiwara). He taught for 38 years in the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program as well as at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Canadian Opera Company, Santa Fe Opera, Houston Grand Opera, and other companies.