Stephen Phillips, the former General Director of State Opera South Australia, has died after a long illness.

Paying tribute to him in a statement, State Opera South Australia said that Phillips was “a strong supporter and contributor to our company’s proud history of ‘firsts’,  including the first Australian-built Ring Cycle in 2004 and the first international performance of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking and many other contemporary operas.”

Stephen Phillips. Photo © State Opera South Australia/Facebook

Raised in Stratford-on-Avon in the United Kingdom, Phillips arrived in Australia in 1973 and worked at the Sydney Opera House when it was opened by Queen Elizabeth II In October that year.

Phillips held the role of General Director of State Opera South Australia from 1995–2011. During his time as there, he presented two Ring Cycles: the Théâtre du Châtelet production in 1998, and the first all-Australian production directed by Elke Neidhardt in 2004.

Australian premieres under Phillips included Dead Man Walking (2003), Little Women (2007), Moby-Dick (2010), and Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre (2010).

In 2013, Phillips was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for significant services to arts administration in the field of opera.

West Australia Opera paid tribute, calling Phillips a “colleague, friend and advocate for Australian artists.”

“Okay, to start off with I think I’m probably best described as an opera-aniac,” he told ABC Classic in 2010.

“To me, opera is entirely unique and it has an extraordinary ability to suspend the audience’s disbelief in a way that I believe no other performance art form can. And of course it has to be brilliantly performed to achieve this.”