[UPDATED, 5/31/25] Charles Wadsworth, who for years was the familiar face to thousands of Spoleto Festival USA chamber music fans, died Thursday in New York City, the festival confirmed today. He was its founding artistic director of chamber music.
““Charles is why we’re here,” Paul Wiancko, current director of chamber music for the festival, told audience members at today’s 11 a.m. show at the Dock Street Theatre. He created this. He created the lifestyle that the chamber artists live while we’re here at the festival.
“He created the relationship that us, artists, have with you, the audience, which makes everything work and everything worth it. All of this is because of Charles. His hosting style was unmatched. His freedom, his trust, and his willingness to take risks. He will be missed.”
Wiancko dedicated the 11 a.m. program’s “Piano Trio No. 2” by Franz Schubert to Wadsworth.
Wadsworth, 96, was a pianist whose talent took him from rural Georgia to the world-renowned Julliard School, where he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees.
“During his Juilliard years, he directed and accompanied a church performance of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” a Christmas opera composed for television in 1951,” according to an obituary in The New York Times. “Mr. Menotti sent him a note thanking him for undertaking the piece, and the two met in 1958 when Mr. Wadsworth accompanied a singer who was auditioning for a role in one of the composer’s works.”
In 1959, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Menotti invited Wadsworth, then just 30, to develop a chamber music concert series for his new Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. Years later when Menotti planned the Spoleto Festival USA for Charleston, he again turned to Wadsworth to develop a chamber music series.
“Today, Spoleto’s twice-daily chamber music concerts remain a festival bedrock, with devoted audience members clamoring for a seat inside the intimate Dock Street Theatre,” according to a tribute from the festival.
Wadsworth thrilled audiences with energy, humor, stories and a zest for music that electrified the Dock Street Theatre.
His distinctive style thrust artists into the spotlight because “he announced programming only from the stage, which allowed him to highlight the genre’s emerging artists and to program daring repertoire without regard for box office pressures,” the festival said.
“In his career, Wadsworth’s programming included commissions of more than 65 new chamber music works from illustrious composers such as Boulez, Barber and Leonard Bernstein, as well as William Bolcom and John Corgliano. He brought to public attention then-emerging artists, including Richard Goode, Paula Robison, Yo-Yo Ma, Peter Serkin, Pinchas Zukerman and Jessye Norman, and championed such burgeoning string ensembles as the Emerson Quartet and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, which became Spoleto’s quartet in residence and led to the appointment of the late Geoff Nuttall as Spoleto’s Chamber music director in 2010.”
Wadsworth is survived by his wife, Susan Wadsworth, the founder of Young Concert Artists; children, Rebecca, Beryl and David; and grandchildren.
According to Dignity Memorial, Riverside Memorial Chapel in New York City will host a funeral service for Wadsworth. It is scheduled for 11 a.m. June 1.
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