There are many terms in music with the root “trans.” Notes can be transformed, or rearranged. Chords can be transposed, or shifted up and down.
There are also titles of works like Richard Strauss’s “Death and Transfiguration” and Arnold Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night.”
When composing his opera “Lili Elbe,” Tobias Picker drew upon many of these terms and techniques. But the one most important to his score is “transition.”
In “Lili Elbe,” which has its American premiere at the Santa Fe Opera on Saturday, the transitional passages aren’t just connective, as they usually would be in an opera score. Instead, Picker said, “transitional music becomes thematic music, and thematic music becomes transitional.” This gives the work a propulsive, ever-changing sound.
It’s fitting that transitions would be so significant, what Picker called the “structural bones” of the opera. “Lili Elbe” is about a gender transition. The opera, with a libretto by Aryeh Lev Stollman, is based on the story of Lili Ilse Elvenes, or Lili Elbe, a transgender woman living in Paris in the 1920s. Lili’s story is also the subject of the film “The Danish Girl” (2015), starring Eddie Redmayne, based on David Ebershoff’s fictionalized account.
Elbe, a Danish landscape painter born Einar Wegener, was one of the earliest recipients of gender-affirming surgery. Lili (sung by the baritone Lucia Lucas) was married to the artist Gerda Wegener (the soprano Sylvia D’Eramo), who often used her as a model. Like many stories that inspire operas, Elbe’s had a tragic ending. In 1931, at the Dresden Women’s Clinic, she had an experimental uterine transplant, which led to complications and her death.
For his libretto, Stollman, who is Picker’s husband as well as his collaborator, turned to primary sources, including Elbe’s posthumously published memoir “Man Into Woman.” Written in Danish, the memoir has three main translations — two in English, one in German. “They’re all a little bit different,” Stollman said. These inconsistencies, combined with Lili’s tendency to exaggerate, made Stollman’s task challenging.
His solution was to lean into myth, specifically the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, which has a long tradition in opera. (One of the earliest operas is Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” and composers from Gluck to Offenbach to Matthew Aucoin have written Orpheus operas.) “Orpheus was the instrument of transition for Eurydice,” Stollman said, bringing her back from the underworld. “She was making a transition, from death into life.”
“Lili Elbe” opens with a play within an opera — Lili and Gerda attend an Orpheus play with dissonant music in an early 20th-century style.
The myth doesn’t map one-to-one onto this story. At different moments, Lili and Gerda each resemble Orpheus. In one scene, Lili says, “Einar Wegener is not of the living anymore.” And while Orpheus looks back, Picker said, “Lili never looks back. Lili is always going forward.”
Despite that, Lili still holds certain ideas of her time: She believes that to be a woman she must marry a man and have children. “She creates her own dilemma,” Picker said. “The conflict leads to the sequence of events that ends in her death.”
The Santa Fe production of “Lili Elbe” comes 30 years after Picker’s first opera, “Emmeline,” premiered at Santa Fe. Set in a small New England town, “Emmeline” is a retelling of the Oedipus myth from the mother’s point of view.
There are similarities between these operas’ heroines: “They’re both strong women who, in the end, make a choice, a fateful choice,” Picker said.
“Emmeline” was praised for its tunefulness. These days, Picker said, “I think of my music as being tonal adjacent.” In “Lili Elbe,” he added: “The music has fluidity. It moves easily between tonality and non-tonality.” Singable melodies still abound, including D’Eramo’s aria “I See a Woman,” which can easily get stuck in a listener’s head.
From the beginning, Picker had Lucas, a trans woman, in mind for the lead role. “What I hear in Lucia’s voice is difficult to explain simply because it is so utterly unique,” he said.
He met Lucas when he was casting a 2019 production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” for Tulsa Opera, where he was the artistic director. (Lucas sang the title role.) He said he was immediately impressed by her “vocal power and artistic nuance.”
Like Elbe, Lucas is a trailblazer. “When I came out, there weren’t openly trans opera singers,” she said. “I know some people, a decade or two older than me, who were trans their entire life. They just came out after their career was done.”
Lucas, who is married to the contralto Ariana Lucas, saw parallels to her life in Elbe’s story. “The way that I came out was at this opera ball in 2014,” she said. “My wife went wearing a Marlene Dietrich-type outfit with a little top hat, and I was wearing a dress. People recognized my wife before they recognized me, and it was great to see their reaction.”
A similar scene occurs in “Lili Elbe,” when Lili attends a gallery opening in feminine attire. Some lines from the libretto, like “I’d marry you again,” were even borrowed from Lucas’s life.
We don’t know what the historical Elbe’s voice sounded like. In “Man Into Woman,” Elbe says that after her orchiectomy (a procedure to remove one or both testicles), she developed a “soprano” voice, seemingly overnight, which makes for a good story, but would be a medical first.
“When testosterone becomes a dominant hormone, the voice can drop,” Lucas said. “But it’s just a one-way street.” Voices don’t un-drop, though voice training and something called voice feminization surgery can make them slightly higher.
Throughout the opera, Lucas’s voice stays low, though she sings higher when Lili is overjoyed or excited. “I never try to go into falsetto, but I do sort of a voix mixte,” she said, or “mixed voice.”
Lucas’s involvement in “Lili Elbe” makes it perhaps the first large-scale opera about a transgender historical figure performed by a transgender singer. (She also serves as the production’s dramaturg.) A precursor was Laura Kaminsky’s chamber opera “As One.”
Picker said that for the premiere, in Switzerland in 2023, and for the foreseeable future, he stipulated the role of Lili Elbe had to be sung by a trans performer. Maybe at some point a cisgender person could do it, he said, “but the learning curve would be steep.”
Picker, too, experienced a learning curve writing “Lili Elbe.” Though he said he was familiar with the feeling of being outside the mainstream. “Being and feeling othered is what we have in common,” said Picker, who added that he had grown up gay and Jewish with Tourette’s syndrome.
“When we opened it in fall 2023, we thought, ‘This opera is never going to be as relevant as it is right now,’” Lucas said. But with trans rights under attack, it feels especially timely now.
Picker, though, emphasizes the opera’s broad appeal: “I think the piece exists outside of time and current events. It’s a story that anybody can relate to. Marriage and divorce and falling in love and dying. These are universal themes.”
By focusing on “human emotions that touch us,” Lucas said, “that’s one of the things that ‘Lili’ does, is the piece sidesteps advocacy.”
