Opera has always occupied a unique place in the arts, bringing together literature, theater, visual design, and music into a single creative expression. Few contemporary composers have embraced that synthesis more completely than Tobias Picker, whose works have become staples of the modern operatic repertoire.
Although Picker has composed orchestral, chamber, and vocal music, opera has remained his artistic home. His latest work, Lili Elbe, recently received its American premiere at the Santa Fe Opera, continuing a career that has consistently explored compelling human stories through music.
What makes Picker’s artistic journey especially fascinating is how naturally it grew from the environment in which he was raised.
A Childhood Immersed in Culture
Picker grew up in Westchester County, New York, in a home where art and literature were woven into daily life. His mother was both a painter and shoe designer, while his father was a writer with a deep interest in literature and the visual arts.
“My mother was an artist... She was very much an artist and a creator. My father had been a writer. He was very literary and very interested in art.”
Music entered his life almost immediately. As a child he listened to recordings of Kurt Weill, heard stories about Wagner from his grandfather, and discovered the lives of great composers through bedtime reading.
“My mother... went through a phase of reading composer biographies and she would read those to me as bedtime stories.”
That early immersion extended beyond recordings and books. At eight years old, Picker wrote to composer Gian Carlo Menotti expressing his interest in writing opera. Menotti responded, encouraging the young musician, who would eventually meet him several years later. Picker also entered the Juilliard Preparatory Division before reaching his teenage years, placing him in an environment where musical ambition was simply part of everyday life.
Learning From the Masters
Picker’s formal education took him through the Manhattan School of Music, Juilliard, and Princeton. Along the way he studied with three towering figures of twentieth-century composition: Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, and Charles Wuorinen.
Harold C. Schoenberg once referred to them as “the father, son and holy ghost of Northeastern musical academicism,” Picker recalled with a smile.
Yet his own musical language followed a different path.
“You have to look very hard to hear the influences of my teachers. But it’s there in the cracks. I learned a lot from them.”
While he admired each composer, Picker understood early that his own artistic goals differed.
“I had no interest in writing for a handful of cognoscenti.”
That commitment to communicating with audiences has remained one of the defining characteristics of his work.
Words, Rhythm, and Story
For Picker, opera begins with storytelling rather than formulas.
When asked whether music or words come first, he offered an answer that reflects the flexibility of his creative process.
“Sometimes the music comes first and sometimes the words come first. There’s no hard and fast rule about it.”
His respect for language runs deep.
“I am inspired by words and poetry... I’m always conscious of the rhythm of the words I use.”
Rather than separating text from music, Picker hears them as complementary forces. The rhythm of language naturally suggests melody, while melody can also invite words to emerge.
His explanation also highlights the collaborative nature of opera. Although librettists provide the text, Picker sees the composer as the person who ultimately transforms those words into a complete dramatic experience.
“The composer composes the opera, not the librettist.”
Technology as a Creative Partner
Like many contemporary composers, Picker has embraced digital technology while maintaining the disciplines learned through decades of writing by hand.
He composed exclusively with pencil and manuscript paper for twenty-five years before adopting notation software in the early 1990s.
The greatest difference, he says, is companionship.
“It was a lonely pursuit... I didn’t hear any simulacrum of what I had done until I went to the rehearsal.”
Today he can hear a full orchestral realization while composing.
“It’s less lonely when I can fill the room with my sounds as I’m composing.”
Technology has not replaced musical imagination. Instead, it has shortened the distance between inspiration and hearing the results.
Bringing Lili Elbe to the Stage
Picker’s newest opera tells the story of Lili Elbe, one of the first known recipients of gender-affirming surgery.
The project began after seeing The Danish Girl, but Picker and librettist Ariel Dorfman Stillman chose to build the opera primarily from Elbe’s own diaries and letters.
“I felt that she was a fantastic operatic subject.”
Like every commissioned opera, Lili Elbe developed under real deadlines, but completion never meant finality.
“I make tweaks right up to the very last until they say, ‘Go away... no more.’”
Those revisions extend beyond words. Orchestration, pacing, and dramatic details continue evolving throughout rehearsals as Picker weighs suggestions from conductors, directors, and performers against his own artistic instincts.
“I only make changes that I feel will make the opera stronger.”
Looking Forward
Classical music has weathered repeated predictions of decline throughout Picker’s lifetime, yet he remains remarkably measured about its future.
“I don’t think it’s dying.”
He recognizes that live performance faces increasing competition from digital media, while also pointing to thriving companies and enthusiastic audiences that continue to support new work.
That optimism seems consistent with the larger arc of his career. From a childhood filled with paintings, books, opera recordings, and conversations about Wagner to international recognition as one of America’s leading opera composers, Tobias Picker has spent a lifetime bringing multiple artistic worlds together.
His music demonstrates that opera remains one of the richest forms of artistic expression, capable of combining literature, visual imagination, theater, and orchestral color into stories that continue to speak to contemporary audiences.
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