Stuart Skelton

Stuart Skelton stands among the uncommon true heldentenors, a voice type devoted to the demanding heroic tenor roles in operas by Wagner along with other German composers active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His performances have taken him to leading opera houses and concert platforms across Australia and Europe as well as the United States, the country where part of his training occurred.

Born in Sydney in 1968, Skelton achieved an important early success by winning Australia’s McDonald’s Aria Competition, an achievement that led to further study at the University of Cincinnati and the Merola Opera Program of the San Francisco Opera. He developed into the heldentenor category over time, noting that the notion of a young singer in this category amounts to a contradiction in terms and that the voice naturally assumes such roles later. At age twenty-nine he made his first appearance in Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Karlsruhe Opera; before the premiere he received a telephone call from a teacher who simply advised him to hang up and proceed. Subsequent engagements have included the Bavarian State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Metropolitan Opera, Seattle Opera, La Scala, and the Paris Opéra, among numerous other prominent venues. Although he has concentrated on German and Austrian works, he has also taken on major dramatic parts from Eastern Europe and Russia, among them Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades and Janáček’s Jenufa, and he has performed Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes in English. In 2014 he received the Male Singer of the Year award at the International Opera Awards.

Skelton maintains an active concert schedule as well, having performed with every leading Australian orchestra, the BBC Symphony, the BBC Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic, the London Symphony, several prominent German ensembles, and the San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston Symphony Orchestras. His concert repertoire centers on Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, and Missa Solemnis, Op. 123, together with Mahler’s orchestral song cycle Das Lied von der Erde. Several recordings of the Mahler work document his performances, including a 2018 release on the BR Klassik label featuring mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Simon Rattle and a 2019 Avi recording with the Düsseldorf Symphony conducted by Ádám Fischer. In 2020 he recorded the role of Peter Grimes for Chandos under Edward Gardner, and in 2021 he appeared on a recording of Oskar Fried’s orchestral song Verklärte Nacht.