BIOGRAPHY

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Charles Styles is a British tenor from Tamworth, Staffordshire, now based in the United States. In Summer 2026, he will be singing the role of Don José in La Tragédie de Carmen for the prestigious Merola Opera Program in San Francisco. In this same year, he is scheduled to graduate from the Yale School of Music. Roles he has undertaken while in America include Vaudemont in Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, Rodolfo in Puccini's La Bohème, and Turiddu in Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. In 2025, Charles won the Connecticut District of the The Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition. Recent European engagements include understudying the First Armed Man in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte for Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

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Admired for his ‘vocal excellence' (Opera News), ‘gleaming top notes, a warm middle register and considerable dramatic insight’ (The Guardian), British tenor Charles Styles made his critically acclaimed London debut in March 2023, replacing Stuart Skelton at short notice in the world premiere of Iain Bell’s Beowulf with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Martyn Brabbins at the Barbican. Beowulf was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 18 April.

 

Born in Tamworth, Styles originally intended to become an academic. After scholarships to Eton and Oxford, he decided upon a singing career, following the encouragement of the conductor Christian Thielemann in 2017. Originally preferring private study to a conservatoire, he has been a pupil of tenor Brian Smith Walters since 2018. Styles graduated top of his faculty from Oxford with an MPhil in Philosophical Theology as a Clarendon Scholar in 2021. He made his professional operatic debut in 2022 as a member of the Glyndebourne Chorus, first for Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, then later for the Autumn tour: he returned to Glyndebourne in 2023 for Poulenc’s Les Dialogues des Carmélites, directed by Barrie Kosky.​