NEW YORK, NY (January 29, 2024) – Grammy Award-winning American composer Tobias Picker and Lambda Literary Award-winning librettist Aryeh Lev Stollman’s newest opera Lili Elbe was named “Best World Premiere of 2023” at the OPER! AWARDS 2024 ceremony, held today at the Amsterdam Opera House. The OPER! AWARDS are Germany’s only international opera prize, presented annually to the most outstanding creative talents in the global opera industry, chosen by a jury of music journalists.
Lili Elbe premiered at the Theater St. Gallen in October 2023. It is the first grand opera written for and about a historical person of trans experience, and the world premiere starred American heldenbaritone Lucia Lucas. Lili Elbe is available to stream on demand on OperaVision until June 8, 2024.
The OPER! AWARDS jury commented, "One might call it an old hat: transgender individuals on stage have been around nearly as long as opera itself. But never before has this topical socio-political subject been set to music in such a large-scale, skillfully touching way as in Lili Elbe by Tobias Picker – the production with which Theater St. Gallen courageously reopened its renovated house. In her portrayal of one of the first people to undergo gender affirmation surgery, the female baritone Lucia Lucas in particular created a musical monument to this historical figure that also reflects the experiences of her own life."
Tobias Picker said, "I am deeply honored and grateful that Lili Elbe has been recognized as the 'Best World Premiere of 2023' at the OPER! AWARDS. Lili Elbe is an opera about universal themes of love, sacrifice, loss, and heartbreak. To rephrase Gandhi, ‘we are all siblings.’”
Commissioned by the Konzert und Theater St. Gallen, the opera tells the story of the painter Lili Elbe, who had the first gender affirmation surgery in the 1930s. In the tradition of great operatic works, Lili Elbe is the story of a love overcoming all obstacles. The opera allows a glimpse into the life of Lili Elbe and her wife Gerda Wegener, both famous painters. The opera explores Lili’s coming out and transition at a time when gender affirmation surgery was still completely uncharted territory. During her lifetime, Lili Elbe (1882–1931) was an internationally known personality. Picker and Stollman’s opera Lili Elbe is based on historical sources, including Lili Elbe's own writings.
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 composer Tobias Picker’s seventh opera. His most recent opera Awakenings premiered at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2022 and was praised by The Wall Street Journal as a “a sensitive adaptation… [whose] elegiac, autumnal score, with its eloquent writing for solo string players, treads delicately in these stories of unrealized possibility.” Picker’s operas have been produced all over the world by the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Opéra de Montréal, San Francisco Opera, Dallas Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Covent Garden, Opera Holland Park, English Touring Opera, and Theater an der Wien, among many others. Tobias Picker’s music is published exclusively worldwide by Schott Helicon Music Corporation.
