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08/22/2026
Tobias Picker: Lili Elbe
Lucia Lucas (Lili Elbe/Einar Wegener), Sylvia D’Eramo (Gerda Wegener), Mack Wolz (Anna Larssen Bjørner, Orpheus, Mother Wegener, Young woman), Theo Imart (Danish Countess, Dagmar, Matron), Brian Michael Moore (Claude LeJeune), Sam Taskinen (Marius Wegener), Msimelolo Mbali (Professor Warnekros), Kristján Jóhannesson (Art critic, Major Fernando Porta, Christian X), Jennifer Panara (Hélène Allatini, Eurydice), David Maze (Eric Allatini), Metanola String Quartet: Raul Campos-Calzada (lead violin), Yashar Noroozi (violin), Imgesu Tekerler (viola), Jonas Streit (cello), Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen, Chor des Theaters St. Gallen, Modestas Pitrėnas (conductor)
Recording (Live): Theater St. Gallen, Switzerland (October 2023) – 116’ 41
Double disc Bright Shiny Things BSTC‑0236 – Booklet in English, libretto in English
Composer Tobias Picker and librettist Aryeh Lev Stollman premiered the opera, Lili Elbe, at the Theater St. Gallen in Switzerland and received the 2023 Oper! Award © for “Best World Premiere”. A live recording of the award-winning opening has just been released, and it coincides with the US Premiere this summer at Santa Fe Opera.
A decade ago a bio-pic about Elbe’s life titled, The Two Act Bio‑Opera, dramatizes the life of Einar Wegener, who in 1931 had experimental gender affirmation surgery. She knew the risks, and this resulted in her death. Before the surgery he was in mind, heart and soul, already Lili Elbe. The Danish Girl, starring British actor Eddie Redmayne, was an ‘international hit’; however, Redmayne stated that the part should have gone to a transgender woman.
Questionable casting was not an issue in the opera. Picker cast Heldenbaritone Lucia Lucas, a transgender woman, to sing the lead role. Lucas is the first transgender opera singer cast in a leading role within an American Opera production. Picker first cast her as Don Giovanni in 2019 at Tulsa Opera Oklahoma, and Lucas has since performed in other companies in the US and Europe.
In an interview on Culture Vulture, Stollman said Lucas was interested in playing Lili, but told them “… I need to have a say. I don’t want to have a trans person being the butt of jokes,” and further, “I hope the trans community can trust the fact that I have been sensitive to them.” To keep that assurance, she was asked to serve as the opera’s dramaturg.
In addition to being a novelist, Stollman is also a neuroradiologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. As librettist he wanted to accurately represent Lili’s emotional and physical journey of her transition. Stollman said Lucas “helped us understand what the experience of transitioning is like–what she felt, what she endured, what she thought, what it was like making such a major decision.”
Picker’s score is dynamic with progressive musicality that keeps evolving, so buoyant in its interplay with Stollman’s intimate, dense singspiel libretto. The work achieves emotional truths, without sensationalizing the events of Elbe’s life. The Picker symphonic range is masterfully era transporting.
The “Overture” evokes a romantic vibrancy that sets the scene of a play within an opera as a sustained, prismatic motif and jumping off point. Einar and his wife, Gerda, talk during a production of Orpheus, who is in the underworld pleading for Eurydice to return to him singing, “we shall reach the upper world/Only what is behind us need be feared.”
The next day Gerda, a portrait painter, finds out her model, Anna Larssen Bjørner (mezzo-soprano Mack Wolz), has to cancel the sitting, but Gerda (Sylvia D’Eramo) asks her husband Einar, a landscape painter himself, and a crossdresser, to sit in for outlining sketches. They muse on the differences in painting real people versus landscapes. Gerda sings to Lili to ‘pretend to be Anna.’ Then adding, “Einar you are so pretty. Prettier than Anna. The model for which I have longed…I see a woman. A Beautiful woman.”
Gerda sings of her husband’s radiance as a woman, her love, totally committed to his reality and supports Lili’s decision to transition.
Weeks after recovering from her surgery Lili and Gerda arrive at the Danish Royal court to petition to have Lili’s gender officially affirmed and to have her marriage to Gerda annulled in a mutually amicable decision. The couple still loved each other as soul mates.
Lili’s brother, Marius, brings her home after several years and Mother Wegener is hysterical when she realizes the truth. Mother Wegener (Wolz) is so horrified at Lili’s gender transition and demands that she leave her mother’s house.
Sylvia D’Eramo’s luminous soprano voice has such measured emotional power and essays her journey through her husband’s transitions. Lucas’ complex emotional journey reaches tragedian dimensions. Both performances are hypnotic in their theatrical power. The supporting cast is equally impressive as they double‑up performing other characters and gender roles.
There are masterful moments of operatic pastiche from different eras. Sharp Stravinskian strings cut through in the recovery room after the uterine surgery with Lili’s strangled voice of delirium as she perceives an Orpheus dream with the chorus and Dr. Warnekros (Msimelelo Mbali) crashes his basso voice singing “We shall reach the upper world.”
Conductor Modestas Pitrėnas’ detailing and the 50 musicians of the Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen deliver all of the dimensions of Picker’s complex score. In this live performance recording, some passages of the libretto are a little sound cloudy, perhaps due to many scenes of cross singing or perhaps an acoustical imbalance between singers and orchestra in the concert hall.
Nearly a century after Lili Elbe’s groundbreaking transition, the opera tackles so many issues of sexual identity that still resonate today as transgender Americans, facing off with a government denying their rights, ignoring their humanity to live their own truth with courage and dignity whatever the challenges and whatever the cost.
Lewis J. Whittington
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