Fredric Woodbridge Wilson

Harvard University, 2009

Fredric Woodbridge Wilson is the Curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection, which is the oldest major theatre collection in the United States and one of the largest collections of its kind in the world. He came to Harvard University in 1996, following fourteen years at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City as Curator of the Gilbert and Sullivan Collection (consisting of Victorian theatre, music, opera, poetry, journalism, and literature).

He is a musicologist, and for many years he was a conductor and music editor, having published more than fifty musical editions and arrangements. His particular interests include the choral music of the Renaissance, in the music and theater of the Victorian period, and in English and American opera and musical theater. From 1969 to 1981 he was the director of the Wall Choirs, which he conducted in more than 400 concerts of choral music and more than two dozen stage productions. He has served as consultant to a number of professional opera companies, including the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in London, Kentucky Opera in Louisville, Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York, and the Performing Arts Center in Purchase, New York. He has worked as an editor for several music publishers, and was a founding partner and editor of Allaire Music Publications (ASCAP) and Woodbridge Wilson Music Publications (BMI).

Mr. Wilson has originated, organized, and presented more than forty-five library and museum exhibitions and several conferences on music, theater, and opera, held at Harvard University, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Kentucky Center for the Arts in Louisville, and Purchase College in New York. He has also organized and hosted two choir festivals, three conferences on Gilbert and Sullivan and Victorian theater, and symposiums on the choreographer George Balanchine (2004) and on Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes (2009).

He has written and lectured widely, and has provided program notes and plot synopses for many opera productions. He has presented numerous lectures and conference papers, written many program notes, and contributed chapters or introductions to a number of publications including several volumes of Performing Arts Resources, published by the Theatre Library Association.

Reflecting a long-standing interest in the operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Mr. Wilson served as textual advisor for an edition of the complete Savoy Opera libretti for the Folio Society, London, and he is the founder and general editor of the W. S. Gilbert Edition. In 1989, in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Morgan Library, he published An Introduction to the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas From the Collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library. He has contributed to Grove's Dictionary of Opera, Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and other reference works. His most recent publications are The Theatrical World of Angus McBean, a book of photographs by the eminent British photographer (David R. Godine, 2009), and Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: A Pocket Guide (2009).

Among his current projects are a critical edition of the orchestral score of Sullivan's first opera, Cox and Box; a facsimile and performing edition of motets by the sixteenth-century Slovenian composer Jacobus Gallus; an encyclopedia reference book on the Gilbert and Sullivan operas; and a reference book on the historic theaters and halls of Boston. He has completed seventeen volumes of a new edition of Shakespeare's plays (all freely available on the Internet), based on the original 1623 edition, arranged specially for dramatic reading.

In 1996, Mr. Wilson was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to pursue research in the history of Victorian theatrical publishing. He has also received four first-place awards for excellence in music editing from the Music Publishers' Association and the American Choral Directors' Association, and a first-place award for excellence in exhibition catalogues from the Rare Book and Manuscript Section of the American Library Association.

Mr. Wilson is also a specialist in computer applications for research and editing, having served as President of the Northeast Association for Computers in the Humanities. He was the author of the "DataKit" text utility programs, first released in 1984, which were used widely in academic and publishing circles. Concurrently with his curatorial position at the Morgan Library, Mr. Wilson held the positions of Head of Computing at the Morgan Library and Adjunct Professor of Museum Studies in the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University.

He has served on the Board of Directors of the Theatre Library Association, the Society for Textual Scholarship, the Music Publishers' Association, and the Dance Heritage Coalition. He is a member of many organizations, including the Old Cambridge Shakespeare Association; the Signet Society of Harvard University; the Harvard Musical Association, Boston; the Society of Printers, Boston; the Harvard Club of New York City; the Senior Common Room of Lowell House in Harvard College; and he is a proprietor of the Boston Athenaeum and a fellow of the Pierpont Morgan Library. Since living in the Boston area has attended between 125 and 150 musical, theatrical, opera, and ballet performances annually. He directed the Lowell House Opera (a student-run organization that has presented an annual fully-staged opera at Lowell House since 1938) in its 2000 production, the Benjamin Britten version of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.