Former Seattle Opera General Director, Speight Jenkins has passed away at the age of 89.

Born on Jan. 31, 1937 in  Dallas, Texas, Jenkins was taken to his first opera at the age of 7, and he fell immediately in love with the art form. He later went on to get his Bachelors at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1961 graduated from Columbia Law School.

Jenkins started his career serving in the U.S. Army as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and later became a music critic for Opera News and the New York Post.

He also served as the  host for U.S. television’s Live from the Metropolitan Opera and a guest speaker on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.

In 1983, he began his tenure with the Seattle Opera and helped transform it into one of the leading US opera companies during his 31 years as General Director, until 2014.

Under his watch, the Seattle Opera grew into one of the largest and most respected opera companies in the United States, recognized worldwide for its ambitious programming, its nurturing environment for young artists, and its vital presentations of Wagner’s four-opera epic, Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Jenkins was a believer that even the grandest operas should be for the people and as a result he helped usher in a new era of audience accessibility with practices we now consider standard, like translated supertitles and post-show talkbacks. In 2006, he was named one of the 25 “most powerful” names in American Opera by Opera News, and upon his retirement the city and county proclaimed August 9, 2014, Speight Jenkins Day, naming a street in his honor.

In a statement Seattle Opera’s General Director James Robinson said, “As we mourn the loss of Seattle Opera’s former General Director, we also celebrate the extraordinary impacts he made on the world of opera and the greater arts scene in the Pacific Northwest. Speight was a force, a true impresario who launched countless careers over the years… [he] was exacting, demanding, and utterly committed to excellence. He remains an inspiration to so many of us who now lead opera companies in the US.”