Spoleto Festival USA’s founding director of chamber music dies at 96

Pianist and Spoleto’s founding Artistic Director of Chamber Music Charles Wadsworth died May 29, 2025, in New York City. He was 96.

A preeminent leader in the field of chamber music, Wadsworth expanded the genre’s populist appeal, at Spoleto and worldwide. Presenting innovative programming and a stable of consummate soloists, he charmed audiences, encouraged generations of virtuoso musicians, and developed a concert format that propelled chamber music concerts and festivals worldwide. His success inspired the renowned Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, where he also served as founding artistic director from 1969 to 1989. When Wadsworth retired from Spoleto Festival USA in 2009, he had served both Spoleto festivals for 50 years—initiating the chamber music series at Spoleto Festival USA’s Italian predecessor, the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of Two Worlds) in 1960, and starting with its Charleston counterpart in 1977.

Born in rural Georgia, the pianist’s prodigious talent took him from Newnan, Ga.—where his family had moved—to the University of Georgia in Athens, and ultimately, The Julliard School where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees. In 1959, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Gian Carlo Menotti invited Wadsworth, then just 30 years old, to develop a chamber music concert series for his fledgling Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. With an aim to develop an inviting, relaxed concert atmosphere that would showcase up-and-coming American musicians, Wadsworth honed an enduringly successful presentation.

Following the success of the Italian concert series, Lincoln Center commissioned Wadsworth to establish a chamber music series within the evolving cultural landmark. And when Menotti planned the inaugural Spoleto Festival USA, he asked Wadsworth to replicate the chamber music series design in Charleston. 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.

Wadsworth’s distinctive format required the audience’s unwavering trust in the series’ director:  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. 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.

As a pianist, his performance calendar included engagements at The White House, playing for Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. He treasured annual “Wadsworth and Friends” events, part lecture, part concert; and annually headlined a performance at the Charles Wadsworth Auditorium in his hometown.

Wadsworth received numerous honorary degrees, prestigious awards from the nations of France and Italy, the City of New York’s Handel Medallion, and the Order of the Palmetto as well as the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts in South Carolina. In 2012, he was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame, and accepted the award from the stage of the Dock Street Theatre—“the only place I would want [to receive it],” he later recalled. He gave his final Charleston performance from that stage a year later.