After an extensive international search, Seattle Opera on Thursday announced James Robinson, artistic director of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, as the company’s new general and artistic director.
Robinson, who has been artistic director at the opera company in Missouri since 2008, will join Seattle Opera on Sept. 4, becoming only the fifth leader in the company’s 61-year history. He succeeds Christina Scheppelmann, who announced last year that she would be leaving after the end of the 2023-24 season to become general and artistic director of Brussels’ La Monnaie/De Munt in January 2025.
Seattle “is an incredible city that has wonderful energy,” said the 61-year-old Robinson, who directed a 2004 Seattle Opera production of Bizet’s “Carmen” that sold more tickets than any opera in the company’s history. “I actually think Seattle Opera is positioned quite wonderfully, in a city that is growing and that has opera in its DNA, because for decades it’s had a world-class opera company. So let’s shake things up a bit, while at the same time not abandoning our core audience.”
Robinson fell in love with opera while studying composition under lauded American composer Dominick Argento. His first opera job, when “I was supposed to be working on my master’s thesis,” he said, was as an usher for Santa Fe Opera. Watching performance after performance that summer, he said, “I just thought, ‘it doesn’t get better than this.’”
Robinson has worked all over the world as a stage director, and during his tenure in St. Louis, he earned a reputation as an innovator in the opera industry. At OTSL, he helmed acclaimed productions including John Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer,” Jack Perla’s “Shalimar the Clown,” and Ricky Ian Gordon’s “27.” Under his leadership, the company also presented vibrant new productions of core repertoire and commissioned 11 world premieres, including Huang Ruo’s “An American Soldier,” with a libretto by Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, and jazz composer Terence Blanchard’s operas “Champion” and “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” The latter of those works, directed by Robinson in 2021, became the first opera by a Black composer ever performed at The Metropolitan Opera.
He is also a skilled interpreter of classics: Robinson’s production of “Porgy and Bess,” which opened the 2019-20 season at The Metropolitan Opera, won a Grammy Award for best opera recording.
“We wanted someone who had a big, bold vision,” said Jonathan Rosoff, search committee chair and co-executive vice president of Seattle Opera’s board of directors. “I think people can expect interesting new works and collaborations with a diverse group of artists, new and interesting interpretations of classic operas that make them relevant in today’s environment, and collaborations with some of the world’s great artists and other opera houses in ways that extend the reach and reputation of Seattle Opera, and we’re really excited about it.”
Seattle Opera’s recent world premieres include “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” by composer Sheila Silver and librettist Stephen Kitsakos, based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini; and the upcoming “Jubilee,” an opera — created and directed by Tazewell Thompson — filled with African American spirituals that premieres in September.
Robinson’s collaborative sensibilities extend beyond the rehearsal room and even beyond the walls of the opera house. “Champion,” Blanchard’s first opera, was the result of a fruitful partnership between OTSL and Jazz St. Louis. Instead of shying away from what Robinson called John Adams’ “brilliant but controversial” opera “The Death of Klinghoffer,” based on the hijacking of an Italian ocean liner by four members of the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985 and the resulting killing of Jewish American Leon Klinghoffer, OTSL partnered with local Jewish and Muslim organizations two years ahead of the production, to increase community support and awareness.
“I sometimes jokingly use the term ‘decriminalize opera,’” Robinson said. “Just the word ‘opera’ can scare people a little bit, and I have always been determined to let people know that an opera experience can be absolutely thrilling. It can be what they think it is. It can be better than what they think it is. But opera can also reflect the community and the issues of the day. It can be resonant and relevant. I believe in letting the community in on what the process is for creating new works, and even new productions of existing works.”
Robinson takes the reins of the organization, whose operating budget for the 2024-25 season is $25.8 million, as it’s still recovering after pandemic closures. After weathering some layoffs in 2021, Seattle Opera now has a core staff of 75 full-time and part-time year-round employees. Single-ticket sales (many buyers of which are newcomers to the opera, and many under the age of 50) are back to pre-COVID numbers, but subscriptions remain at around 60% of what they were pre-pandemic. To help balance that loss, the Opera is currently presenting fewer total performances per season: Pre-COVID seasons typically included about 40 total performances; during the 2023-24 season, it presented 24.
According to a spokesperson for the Opera, Robinson’s salary “is in line with industry norms for a general director of a Tier 1 opera company,” referring to the companies with budgets of over $15 million. According to the most recently available tax information, former General Director Scheppelmann received $337,773 in compensation in fiscal year 2023.
“My big vision is to get audiences back in a really impactful way,” said Robinson, who will be moving to Seattle with his husband, Jim Kroll. “I want to reassure everybody that this isn’t going to be some radical makeover, it’s just enhancing what the company has been doing lately and still presenting the core repertoire that our base really wants to see, and using those as entry points for first-time opera goers.”