Villa Hills native and performer Logan Wagner has performed in operas throughout the country.
Now, he has been accepted into the prestigious Merola Opera Program, a 10-week live-in training program in San Francisco that, as Wagner put it, is “like a stamp of approval for your career.”
The program had a record number of applicants this year: over 1,500, from all over the world. Wagner was one of only 28 people accepted. Starting this summer, he and the other artists selected – who come from everywhere from South Korea to the UK to states throughout the United States – will travel to California to complete the program.
Merola alumni include Joyce DiDonato, who has won a Grammy for Best Classical Vocal Solo three times, and Stuart Skelton, who won Male Singer of the Year at the 2014 International Opera Awards, among numerous others dating back to the mid twentieth century.
“Once they have completed this program, they will join a vibrant community of distinguished alumni who have gone on to thrilling careers with major opera houses around the world,” said Merola Executive Director Sean Waugh in a press release.
LINK nky talked with Wagner about his career, his love of opera and the form’s appeal before he heads off later this year.
“I grew up being really fascinated by music,” Wagner said.
His father, Tom Wagner, plays keyboards in local rock band The Fast Forward, which is still active in and around Northern Kentucky. Observing his father’s “sense of discipline,” Wagner said, “is the thing that taught me how to really be passionate about something.”
He started doing plays and musicals in middle school and high school. He showed an aptitude for singing, so he started taking private voice lessons. One day his instructor, Carl Resnick at the Musical Arts Center in Cincinnati, asked him if he knew how to dance. Wagner said no, and so Resnick began teaching him how.
“I just started falling in love with opera because it was like all of these emotions in musical theater were then heightened by like 10,000,” Wagner said.
He went to the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati, often shortened to CCM, for both his undergraduate and graduate studies. He also earned an artist diploma after completing a post-master’s performance program there.
Since then he’s performed in programs in Des Moines, Santa Fe, Pittsburgh and Virginia. Last year, he performed with New World Orchestra, a program in Miami Beach Florida.
He has a handful of favorite operas. One is Fellow Travelers, which was actually developed in a collaboration between the Cincinnati Opera and CCM, about the 1950s lavender scare that saw mass firings and other forms of social persecution of gay employees in the government. He performed in a production of Fellow Travelers at the Pittsburgh Opera. Others include Peter Grimes, a twentieth century classic by Benjamin Britten, Tosca by Puccini and Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky, which is, in turn, based of a poetic novel by Pushkin.
“What draws me to is the fact that it’s such a long standing art form and something that really explores every bit of the human psyche and that’s told through not only words but also music,” Wagner said.
He encouraged people to explore the art form, which has continued to evolve throughout the centuries.
“My philosophy as an artist is to allow people to see feelings that they have felt themselves on stage and hold up a mirror to that and let people have a cathartic experience in the theater,” Wagner said. “Because we’re all in this place together and experiencing this one thing together for the first time and only time because it changes constantly. That’s a beautiful thing that we shouldn’t take for granted.”
Check out one Wagner’s performances below, and learn more about him at loganwagnertenor.com/media.
