Rising Stars in...Presenting

Timothy O’Leary
General Director, Opera Theatre of St. Louis

The economy may have been sinking, but the karma was good in 2008 when Timothy O’Leary arrived as general director at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis.

He was 33, exactly the same age, he says, at which his predecessor, Charles MacKay (now 62), became general director. And, O’Leary adds with a laugh, Richard Gaddis was 33 when he founded the company in 1976.

The magic number seems to be working. Despite a brutal economy, Opera Theatre of St. Louis is expanding its audience, commissioning new works, and keeping its budgets in the black.

Growing up near Yale University, O’Leary got his first taste of opera as a 17-year-old chorus member in a Yale Opera production of The Magic Flute. Until then, he ranked Les Misérables as the finest combination of words and music ever penned. By the time he returned to Yale Opera the following year in the chorus of The Marriage of Figaro, he had begun to change his mind.

Now 37, O’Leary has wide experience on and off the opera stage. He was an apprentice in the San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program and studied theater management at Columbia University. He was a stage director for companies including New York City Opera and Opera Colorado. His management experience includes a post as managing director of Gotham Chamber Opera, a small downtown New York City troupe, and New York City Opera’s manager of institutional gifts.

Recruited by MacKay, O’Leary arrived at Opera Theatre of St. Louis just as the company started looking more closely at its mission. “We were 35 years old,” he said, “and many of the people who were founders of the organization were feeling a lot of anxiety. Will there be a next generation to carry this forward with the same energy? That was a very uncertain time, but in a way, it got everybody really pulling together and thinking seriously about what we’re here to do.”

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Wynne Delacoma was the classical music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times from 1991 to 2006. She is a freelance arts writer and lecturer and adjunct faculty member at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.