Tobias Picker's New Opera LILI ELBE To Stream On OperaVision, December 8

Grammy Award–winning composer Tobias Picker and Lambda Literary Award–winning librettist Aryeh Lev Stollman's latest opera Lili Elbe — premiered on October 22, 2023 at the Konzert und Theater St. Gallen in Switzerland — will stream on OperaVision beginning December 8, 2023.

Founded in 2014, OperaVision is a free opera streaming platform supported by the European Union's Creative Europe program, offering an extensive library of classic titles and world premiere works. Lili Elbe will be available to stream on demand until June 8, 2024.

 

Commissioned for the reopening of the newly renovated art-brut style Theater St. Gallen, Lili Elbe is the first grand opera written about a historical person of trans experience for a singer of trans experience, American heldenbaritone Lucia Lucas in the title role; Lucas also served as dramaturg to the composer and librettist. The opera is based on the life of the celebrated painter Lili Elbe, who underwent the first-ever gender affirmation surgery in 1930. The opera explores the specific and universal challenges in the lives and marriage of Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener, also a famous painter, at a time in history when the trans experience was completely uncharted territory. The world premiere production of Lili Elbe is conducted by Chief Conductor of the Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen Modestas Pitrenas, directed by Krystian Lada, and choreographed by Frank Fannar Pedersen.

 

Called “a masterpiece full of emotions” by Voralberger Zeitung, Lili Elbe was further praised by Die Welt's Manuel Brug as “a timely and relevant opera that deserves to be widely performed.” Opernglas praised the “exciting, multifaceted, multi-layered score.” The Süddeutsche Zeitung called the production an “evening full of nightmares and hopes, with a fearless, always fascinating Lucia Lucas at the center, an iridescent experience, gripping in its truthfulness,” while Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote: “the librettist Aryeh Lev Stollman has condensed the extraordinary story of its protagonist into an opulent picture arc . . . With Lili Elbe opera has definitely arrived in the 21st century.”

 

Lili Elbe is Tobias Picker's seventh opera. His sixth opera Awakenings, also on a libretto by Aryeh Lev Stollman, premiered in 2022 and was praised by Musical America as a “richly conceived masterwork [which] flies straight to the heart.” Picker's operas have been produced all over the world by the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, LA Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Opéra de Montréal, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, Opera Holland Park, Glimmerglass Festival, and many others.

 

Tobias Picker is an American composer whose music has been described as “displaying a

distinctively soulful style that is one of the glories of the current musical scene” and “one of the most consistently interesting among the present generation of US theatre composers” (BBC Music Magazine), “a genuine creator with a fertile unforced vein of invention” (The New Yorker), and “our finest composer for the lyric stage” (Wall Street Journal).

He was the recipient of the 2020 Grammy Award for “Best Opera Recording” for his family

opera, Fantastic Mr. Fox (BMOP Sound). Picker's operas have been commissioned by Theater St. Gallen (Lili Elbe), Santa Fe Opera (Emmeline), LA Opera (Fantastic Mr. Fox), Dallas Opera (Thérèse Raquin), The Metropolitan Opera (An American Tragedy), San Francisco Opera (Dolores Claiborne), and Opera Theatre Saint Louis (Awakenings). The chamber version of Thérèse Raquin was premiered at The Royal Opera House's Linbury Theater. His orchestral music has been performed by major American orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, and the Cleveland Orchestra, as well as the Munich Philharmonic, Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, and at the BBC Proms. Picker served as Artistic Director of Tulsa Opera from 2016-2022, during which time he cast Lucia Lucas as Don Giovanni, the first transgender opera singer in a leading role on the American stage, as well as producing Greenwood Overcomes, a concert featuring works by 23 Black composers in observance of the 2021 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial. He and his partner of 44 years, novelist and neuroradiologist Aryeh Lev Stollman, were married by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. His music is published exclusively by Schott.

Aryeh Lev Stollman is the author of three highly praised novels and numerous short stories. His first novel, The Far Euphrates (Riverhead) is a winner of a Lambda Literary Award, an American Library Association Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Review Recommended Book of the Year, and a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book. The Far Euphrates has been translated into five languages. His second novel, The Illuminated Soul (Riverhead), is a winner of Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribalow Prize. Stollman's short fiction has appeared in Story, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, The Southwest Review, and LitMag. His story collection The Dialogues of Time and Entropy was also published by Riverhead, and his story "Lotte Returns!" was commissioned and broadcast by National Public Radio. His third novel, Queen of Jerusalem, was published by Aryeh Nir/Modan in Hebrew translation under the title Divrei y'mei Naamah. Prior to Lili Elbe, Stollman wrote the libretto for Awakenings based on the book by Oliver Sacks, and commissioned by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, which premiered in June 2022. He is also a neuroradiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

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