The world’s first transgender opera, “Lili Elbe,” Makes History Twice With Transgender American Bariton Lucia Lucas In The Lead Role as Lili
by Heather Cassell
Transgender Danish painter Lili Elbe’s story is now an opera. It’s a historical first. It is the first-ever opera about a historical transgender figure. It is also the first time a transgender opera singer, baritone Lucia Lucas, is the leading performer in an opera about a transgender woman.
The opera, “Lili Elbe,” premiered at the re-opening of the historic Theater St. Gallen in North West Switzerland December 3, 2023.
“Lili Elbe” is bringing opera into the 21st century. Opera dates back to 16th-century Florence, Italy, its birthplace during the Renaissance where the art form was nurtured by the powerful Medici family, according to Britannica.
“It’s important and why young people in new audiences should come,” Lucia told Queer Guru TV about modernizing the opera and being out as an advocate for transgender rights and for opera.
Exraordinary Journey
The opera follows Lili’s journey as she discovers her gender and transitions into the woman within her male body. She does this within her marriage to fellow Danish painter Gerda Gottlieb. It is Gerda who awakens the latent Lili when she asks her then-husband to sit in for a model who is late to her painting session.
Gerda and Lili met when they were both students at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Gerda was an illustrator and painter who created popular works. Lili, born in 1882, was known for her Danish landscapes.
As Lili began to evolve, the 20th-century painters moved to Paris to find freedom. Lili lived publicly as a woman posing as Gerda’s sister-in-law. Gerda advanced her career as an artist.
Lili fell into a dark period and considered suicide in 1930. She met German doctor and sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, who opened the world’s first-ever Institute for Sexual Science. This was long before American scientist, Dr. Alfred Kinsey, began studying human sexuality in the United States in the 1930s and established the Kinsey Institute.
A year later, Lili went to Germany to begin her gender-affirmative surgery. The experimental surgery happened 20 years before American actress and singer Christine Jorgensen transitioned and returned to the United States. Christine made headlines when she became the first transgender American woman to openly undergo gender-affirmation surgery in 1952.
Not only was Lili one of the first people in the world to undergo early gender-affirming surgeries she also had a uterus transplant.
“She put her trust and doctors who were really doing experimental things at the time, specifically the uterus transplant,” Lucia told Queer Guru TV. She noted that it took “another 80 years [for the uterus surgery] to become a successful operation that people have had done and had kids after.”
Retelling Differently
This isn’t the first time Lili’s story has been told. The award-winning, “The Danish Girl,” a novel loosely based on Lili Elbe’s life by gay author David Ebershoff became a bestseller in 2000. “The Danish Girl” was adapted into a movie by the same name directed by Academy Award-winner Tom Hooper in 2015. The film starred Academy Award-winners Eddie Redmayne, who won the year before for “The Theory of Everything,” who played Lili, and Alicia Vikander, who played Lili’s wife, Gerda, in the biofictional movie.
Alicia snagged her first-ever Oscar for supporting actress for her portrayal of Gerda in “The Danish Girl.”
In 2021, Eddie, a cis-gendered man, received much backlash over playing Lili at the time, told The Sunday Times, he had a few regrets and said making the film was a “mistake” despite having the best of intentions, reported Vanity Fair.
This time, Lili’s story is being told differently. Lucia, whom the opera was written for by Grammy-winning gay American Composer Tobais Picker, insisted on another transgender person being involved in the production of the opera.
“I don’t want to walk into a room on the first day of rehearsal and have no idea what’s going on,” Lucia told Queer Guru TV. “The story is too important for that.”
Lucia & Lili’s Journeys
Lucia auditioned for various opera houses in 2016 and 2017, but she didn’t make her debut until 2019. Her first operatic opportunity was singing Wotan, the king of the gods, in Richard Wagner’s “Die Walküre” in 2018, reported the New York Times.
Lucia’s big debut on the opera scene was as Public Opinion in Jacques Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld” at the English National Opera at the London Coliseum in 2019, reported Pink News.
Around that time Tobais saw her on YouTube. He was composer in residence at the New York City Opera while working at the Tulsa Opera. He contacted her to audition and immediately knew he wanted to work with her watching her audition. The New York project wasn’t ready yet. He needed a Don Giovanni for Tulsa’s production of Amadeus Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” He asked if she would be interested. Lucia jumped at the opportunity becoming the first-ever transgender woman to sing a lead role in an American opera in 2019.
The opera project in New York was dropped, but Tobais had another idea in the works. He saw “The Danish Girl” and thought, “Oh, that’s really operatic story,” Lucia told Gay Guru TV. He wanted to work with Lucia on the opera, “Lili Elbe,” with her in the title role of Lili.
Tobais brought his husband librettist Aryeh Lev Stollman, who is a writer and a neuroradiologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, to work with Lucia and him to ensure the most authentic and historically accurate as possible portrayal of Lili regarding her thought processes as she discovered herself and evolved into being a woman.
At the same time, they wanted to modernize the language used to describe her feelings.
“There’s been so many parallels between Lili’s and my story,” Lucia told Gay Guru TV, noting, “we are separated by about 100 years.”
“We wanted to make it [as] up to date as possible with today’s advocacy language, making it a pleasant experience for any trans performer to perform,” she added. “Because often when I’ve had to put my own identity, or an identity so similar to my own, on stage, it hasn’t been a great experience.”
“It is different from anything I have written,” Tobais told Classic FM about his new opera, “Lili Elbe,” starring Lucia. “It is about the eternity of the earth, the eternal beauty of the earth, about rebirth and the continuation of life.”
The opera was also filmed by OperaVision and is now available to stream for free until June 8.
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