Works & Process to Present The Santa Fe Opera: U.S. Premiere Of LILI ELBE By Tobias Picker
The event will take place on Sunday, October 27, 2025 at 7 PM.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Oct. 02, 2025
Works & Process will present The Santa Fe Opera's U.S. Premiere of Lili Elbe, by composer Tobias Picker and librettist Aryeh Lev Stollman, on Sunday, October 27, 2025 at 7 PM at Guggenheim New York in the Peter B. Lewis Theater. Tickets start at $25 and can be purchased now.
Composer Tobias Picker and librettist Aryeh Lev Stollman present selections from Lili Elbe-the first full-scale opera about a transgender person composed for a trans opera singer in the title role-which will have its American premiere at The Santa Fe Opera in 2026. The opera tells the true story of Lili Elbe, a celebrated Danish painter who, with the steadfast support of her wife, Gerda, became one of the first to undergo gender-affirmation surgery nearly a century ago. Members of the production's creative team will discuss their process and excerpts will be performed. American Heldenbaritonistin Lucia Lucas will take on the title role.
The Works & Process presentation of Lili Elbe will include a moderated discussion and excerpts of the music with Picker, Stollman, director James Robinson, Lucia Lucas, and soprano Sylvia D'Eramo, who performs the role of Lili Elbe's wife Gerda Wegener.
The opera premiered at the Theater St. Gallen in Switzerland in October 2023. Receiving widespread praise, the opera was called "an emotionally charged masterpiece" by Voralberger Zeitung, "...a work that resonates deeply with our times" by Kronen Zeitung, and was named "Best World Premiere" at the 2024 Oper! Magazine awards. Watch the teaser for Lili Elbe here.
About Tobias Picker
GRAMMY Award-winning composer Tobias Picker has drawn commissions from and performances by the world's leading musicians, orchestras, and opera houses. The New Yorker has called him "a genuine creator with a fertile, unforced vein of invention"; The Wall Street Journal wrote he was "our finest composer for the Lyric Stage"; and BBC Music Magazine described him as "displaying a distinctively soulful style that is one of the glories of the current musical scene."
His operas have been commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera (Emmeline, 1996), LA Opera (Fantastic Mr. Fox, 1998), Dallas Opera (Thérèse Raquin, 2001), Metropolitan Opera (An American Tragedy, 2001), San Francisco Opera (Dolores Claiborne, 2013), and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (Awakenings, 2022). His operas have also been produced by the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, San Diego Opera, Opéra de Montréal, Chicago Opera Theater, Covent Garden, Opera Holland Park, English Touring Opera, Glimmerglass Festival, and many other companies. In 2015, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis mounted a major new production of his Emmeline that won universal acclaim as "a work of gripping emotional intensity and extraordinary musical expressivity" (the Dallas Morning News), "one of the best operas written in the past twenty-five years (The Wall Street Journal), and "the greatest American opera of the 20th century (the St. Louis Post-Dispatch). The world premiere recording of Fantastic Mr. Fox, his family opera, was released by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Odyssey Opera in Spring 2019 on the BMOP label, which won the 2020 Grammy award for best opera recording.
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