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Tobias Picker

In 1962 at the age of eight, Tobias Picker corresponded with Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who told him he should write operas. Tobias didn't set himself to doing so immediately, but he did continue his piano and composition studies, first at The Juilliard School and then at the Manhattan School of Music. In 1983, he composed what might be called his first dramatic work, The Encantadas, for actor and orchestra, based on Herman Melville's essays on the Galapagos Islands. Ten years later, Mr. Picker turned his attention to opera, setting to work on a commission from Santa Fe Opera. He chose for his subject the 19th century, true story of Emmeline Mosher, a 14-year-old girl who was seduced by her factory supervisor, became pregnant, and gave birth to a boy. Twenty years later at a boarding house in Maine, she meets, falls in love with and marries a young man who turns out to be the son she gave up for adoption. J. D. McClatchy wrote the libretto based on Judith Rossner's book, Emmeline. The premiere of Emmeline took place in 1996 and was a smashing success. The opera was televised throughout the U.S. and subsequently performed at the New York City Opera.

Those who make it their business to do so took note of a major new voice on the American opera scene and three commissions followed in short succession, from Los Angeles Opera and the Roald Dahl Foundation, Dallas Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera. For Los Angeles Opera Mr. Picker adapted Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox, a tale about a family of foxes and barnyard politics. The opera was given its world premiere in 1998.

For his third opera, Mr. Picker turned to Émile Zola's novel Thérèse Raquin, a prime example of the 19th century French naturalism movement in literature, and a book that fairly screams to be made into an opera. Thérèse Raquin will debut in Dallas on November 30, 2001. Gene Scheer has written the libretto; mezzo-soprano Sara Fulgoni will impersonate Thérèse; tenor Gordon Gietz plays her husband Camille and Richard Bernstein plays her lover Laurent; and the great American soprano Diana Soviero will be Madame Raquin; Francesca Zambello will direct. USOperaWeb talked with Mr. Picker about Thérèse Raquin and its progress to the stage.

"In 1996, I was commissioned by Dallas to write an opera and began looking for a subject (although I am always looking for subjects). I had written a comedy [Fantastic Mr. Fox] and was looking for something with tragic elements, but something with a different kind of characters than those in Emmeline. Émile Zola's novel, Thérèse Raquin, was suggested to me by my sister, who rediscovered it one day while dusting her bookshelves. The book fell to the floor; she picked it up, reread it, and called me immediately to suggest it. I read it and thought it was perfect for what I was looking for. There was something about the way Zola got inside the heads of his characters and put us there in this naturalistic realm, and I found it pretty hard to put down. It got a little tedious toward the end, but I think Zola wanted you to feel the imprisonment of Thérèse and Laurent's guilt." [See Therese Raquin Fever for background on the opera.]

"The story is universal, and I think it's just as relevant today as it was when Zola wrote it. Murder and adultery are not new. If they hadn't been around for centuries there wouldn't be commandments not to commit them. The novel is about the sixth and seventh commandments: thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not commit adultery; it is a moralistic story. I was told that people were not going to be as shocked now as they were in Zola's time. But that isn't true, because the emotional impact on the characters is the same and you still experience that with them. People are still very preoccupied with this. Before the September 11 terrorist attack on New York, all anyone could talk about was some congressman's adulterous affair.

"I've never seen any of the film adaptations. I didn't want to see any other treatments before I wrote my opera. I've heard that they like to change the mode of the murder, throwing Camille from a train, for instance, instead of drowning him. When Charles Ludlam did his satire, The Artificial Jungle, they killed the husband by suffocating him, and then they threw him in the piranha tank where he was slowly eaten away over the months. In our version we have kept it the same as the original, although our ending has a slight twist.

"But, the characters in my opera are not the same characters that are in the book. They are my take on those characters; I'm using them to express myself. I'm not Émile Zola's scribe, his translator, or his spokesperson, and I didn't see myself as making his book into an opera. I am making his story into an opera. Zola based his novel on a real-life event he had read about in the newspaper. Certainly we have used a lot of what Zola invented, but we changed many things from the book. The sequence of events follows roughly, but there are things that happen in the opera that don't happen in the book, and vice-a-versa. And, the characters are more three-dimensional in the opera. Each of them comes alive and we get to know them in a different way than we do when we read the book.

"The first thing I told Gene was that I wanted Thérèse to be much more sympathetic than she was in the book. I wanted her to be a character we could relate to. I've written her music so that it pulls us into her dilemma and makes us understand her. I think of Thérèse as Emmeline's French cousin, because she also makes all the wrong choices. And the more she tries to extricate herself from these bad decisions, the more she becomes the victim of fate and the more tragic she becomes. Thérèse is oppressed, although in a different way than Emmeline. Each of these heroines rebels in her own way and each pays a heavy price for that rebellion.

"There are also parallels between Aunt Hannah in Emmeline and Madame Raquin in Thérèse Raquin. Both of these older women meddle in the lives of the younger women and become catalysts for their downfall. It is Aunt Hannah who decides that Emmeline should be taken from the family and sent to work in the mill, and expects her to send money home to them, and from there her tragedy flows. It is Madame Raquin who decides when she adopts Thérèse that she will marry her son Camille when she grows up. This interference, this control over the direction of these young women's lives, leads to disaster. In Emmeline we witness Aunt Hannah's dismay and horror at what she has wrought. In Thérèse Raquin we follow Madame Raquin to her own downfall as she is tortured by her actions and punished by the results of them."

"I also wanted to make Camille more appealing than he is in the book, so that what happens to him makes him more of a tragic figure." A major change in the opera was having Camille actually present in the second act in the form of his ghost. He becomes an equal character in the story, and personifies the torment Thérèse and Laurent experience.

"Of course, Laurent has to have a great deal of sex appeal, although he becomes less appealing as the story progresses by virtue of his behavior. But, in the beginning he's got to be so attractive we understand why Thérèse responds to him. In the book he is described as an animal; as having an earthy, almost savage, sex appeal. I tried to write him as somebody we would all want to go to bed with, so we could imagine being driven to the point of being utterly and profoundly irresponsible. Laurent is the one who actually commits the murder. Thérèse is his accomplice, but he is the one who has the blood literally on his hands. And he is haunted by his guilt too, just as is Thérèse. But, Thérèse motivates their fate more than Laurent does, and her situation becomes more tragic.

"I like to think of Emmeline as the first course, Fantastic Mr. Fox as the sorbet and Thérèse Raquin as the next course. Doing Fantastic Mr. Fox gave me some experience with comedy, and having that under my belt enabled me to make the tragedy and the melodrama in Thérèse Raquin richer. There is no occasion to laugh during Emmeline. But in Thérèse Raquin, there are moments of comic relief when we can laugh at the characters, otherwise the melodrama would be too over the top."

What should we expect from the music for Thérèse Raquin? "The overture sets the tone and tells us about the relationship of Thérèse and Laurent. It introduces some of the themes, so when events transpire in the opera, we recognize the music as having occurred at the beginning. There is an undercurrent of disturbance that foreshadows what is to come. We will see Madame Raquin bringing in laundry from the line and folding it with Thérèse, and it looks as though things are normal but they're not. Some people who have heard the music tell me it has a French flavor - they say it sounds like 'French' Tobias Picker. Setting French sounds - the characters names and places - gives an opportunity to inflect the music in some French way, which is hard to quantify. Perhaps there is a way of using whole tones we associate with French music, and that might be something people are responding to"

"When I read the novel there were certainly places that suggested themselves to me as arias and ensembles. I may have suggested some of them to Gene, but I didn't insist on those points. I wanted him to reinvent this story as he felt it, and I would respond to that. Every word has to count in a libretto and every idea must be conveyed musically. I sketched Thérèse's theme before I saw the libretto and that theme appears in her first aria in the first scene of Act I. There are themes for each character and leitmotifs for certain situations, but I did not write them until I had the libretto. It is the words, the drama and the characters' emotions that inspire music in me when I'm writing an opera.

"The entire piece is musical line from beginning to end, and out of that line will blossom an aria or ensemble. Arias and ensembles form focal points in the opera. The connective tissue between them is arioso; I have never written recitative. The arias and ensembles are decided, for the most part, before I write the music; they are in the libretto already. They are important moments when things are summed up, crystallized, decided upon, or motivated, which is an operatic tradition. There's even a septet. It was the first time I had written a septet and I found that very exciting, I must say, and difficult. "

How did the singers influence the creation of the opera? "I like to know whom I am writing for - out of which mouth the words and music are going to come - because every singer is different. It's nice to envision a particular singer/actor as the character. It fills it out in my imagination. I could picture Sara Fulgoni being Thérèse in every moment really, because I had met her and she had sung for me and we worked together a bit at the piano. It makes it more human and fun to know who will be singing. For me, the singers are very much musical instruments - living musical instruments - and in that sense it doesn't matter who they are. But in another sense it matters very much. The people who create the roles in my operas are very important to me because I think about them and see them in my mind's eye when I write.

"However, I try to keep the work to myself as much as possible when I'm conceiving it. I'm always in communication with the librettist, of course. I played it for Gene all the time so he would know exactly where I was in the process, and we could talk about changes together. When I had finished it, I played it for the principal singers, in case something jumped off the page as completely irrational. Sometimes a singer will look at the score and say, 'I can't sing this so high or that so low,' and then I address myself to that.

"It's very gratifying for the composer to walk in and see something work without needing any revision. That's my goal. But, I'm sure there will be changes in the rehearsal process, which I always find exciting. I like the collaboration, working together to bring the piece to life. Someday it would be nice to write something that just works without any revision, although I don't know if that is possible."

How are your previous efforts faring in the world? "There have been discussions for Emmeline and Fantastic Mr. Fox, but neither are running into the repertory, which is something I can't really control. Very few people can champion a work today and influence a company to produce it. Emmeline was supposed to have been done in France next season but was postponed for financial reasons. I know that Francesca is always recommending it to companies she works with. Part of the problem is that companies want to have world premieres, which is the same situation in the orchestra world. Getting the second performance is the hardest thing. I'm not complaining. The New York City Opera run of Emmeline was fantastic. Also, when an opera is shown on television, as was the case with Emmeline, there is the feeling that a lot of people have seen it and might not be interested in seeing it again so soon. Emmeline is very difficult and perhaps that slows it down. Fantastic Mr. Fox is very complicated also, perhaps too complicated to have legs.

"I always wanted to write opera - from the time I was a child. I was exposed to it at an early age. Opera was commonly on television when I was a child, even new operas. From the time I could walk and talk, my grandfather taught me that Wagner was the greatest composer who ever lived. When I was nine, we had a project in music class to study [Puccini's] Girl of the Golden West. There was a school-wide contest to see who could make the best set model, and my partner and I won. We were taken to the old Met to see it, which was pretty exciting. Who knows how these things influenced me? I'm sure they did in some way.

"I'm influenced by everything, really. Someone said once that we are the sum total of all of our moments. Actually I don't like to be quoted as saying what influences me. Why should I say? Why should I know? And why should I care, really? If someone else cares, let him decide, and he will be wrong, of course."

Would you care to comment on American opera, in general or specifically? "Opera occupies a different position in cultural life than it did in Puccini and Verdi and Donizetti's time. People go to movies now. Film is the one art form that the 20th century invented and it has eclipsed opera in popularity. Composers have to contend with that in modern times. When Verdi was writing, each new opera was like the latest is film today, it was the people's art, and everyone had to see it.

"But, at the same time, the climate for American opera has changed. There is so much happening now in opera in America. The compositional activity has cranked up notably in the last ten or fifteen years. I think American opera stands a better chance of finding a niche in the repertoire than some new European operas. There is an awareness in European opera houses that something is happening here and there is a lot of interest in what we are doing. We are entering a golden age of American opera.

"I was at the world premiere of Nixon in China (1987) in Houston and liked it very much. I felt that was a very important opera. I would add Porgy and Bess and Susannah to the list also. Showboat is a very important piece, and I hold West Side Story in very high regard. It has become part of the fabric of our country.

"Susannah was written the year I was born and has been performed in almost every opera house in the country, but it only came to the Met a couple years ago. The symbolism of that is very important. Even though it had been done thousands of times, by being done at the Met it was acknowledged as a masterpiece. Now Of Mice and Men is following. Amahl and the Night Visitors and some of Menotti's other operas have been done a great deal. Perhaps nothing has yet replaced La Bohème or Aïda, but there are American operas that have travelled. Nixon in China has been done quite a bit, and Mark Adamo's opera Little Women is being done a great deal. So, I think that there are American operas that have caught on with the public."

What do you make of the rift that still exists between composers who write more accessible music and critics who still want and expect to hear music descended from serialism? "In the '60s and '70s when American modernism was at its height, when 12-tone composers were chic, the critics bashed the shit out of them because they were writing music that was inaccessible. There was a constant stream of vicious criticism and harassment, led by Harold Schonberg and the critics of The New York Times, directed toward my teachers, Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt and Charles Wourinen, who were leaders of the American modernist movement. This has now turned full circle. As soon as composers started writing music that was accessible, the critics starting bashing the shit out of us. It proves that some critics will find no good in anything, and this basically renders most music criticism meaningless. In Europe, Boulez is the music critics' god and the critics there cling tenaciously to the epigones of modernism even as its best young composers turn their backs on it. One of the great European Modernist Icons, Karlheinz Stockhausen has pronounced the World Trade Center bombing 'one of the greatest works of art in history.' Here is the quintessential example of the profound perversity of the last vestiges of musical Euro-trash. For Americans, European modernism is dead.

"There are still extremists on both sides. There are composers who write such difficult music only a few people can claim to enjoy it, and there are others who write music that is so overly accessible it's not interesting. But, a lot of good music came out of the 20th century. Composers today have found ways of synthesizing these two strands; it's not one or the other now. Perhaps I sound bellicose about the modernist movement. Surely some of the music that came out of the modernist, post-Webern period is good. There's modernism in what I do also. I'm not saying the accessible music can't be good. There is good music, mediocre music and bad music. There was then and there is now. It's just that composers decided they wanted an audience bigger than fifteen people."

Mr. Picker has already turned his attention to his next opera, a commission from the Met. His source is Theodore Dreiser's novel, An American Tragedy, which is based on real-life events that transpired in Cortland, New York in 1905. "With American Tragedy we have gone back and researched the original murder and people whom Dreiser based his novel on. It was a big deal when it happened. There is a lot of lore about it. You can actually go out on a boat on the lake where Grace Brown drowned."

Are there plans for operas after that? "As long as there are companies that want my operas, I will continue to write them. But who can predict the future. I have been asked to write an opera after An American Tragedy, but it is so far in the future I can't commit to it yet. It's something that takes a few years of your life. I feel like writing other kinds of music too, and I do. But yes, I can envision writing more operas if there is demand for them."

After the premiere of an opera, is it difficult to leave the world of those people and that story? "I say goodbye to the characters, and I miss them. I missed Emmeline and Mr. and Mrs. Fox and fox cubs and I will miss Thérèse and her people. But, I have new characters to think about: Clyde, Sondra, Roberta and Asa and Elvira Griffiths. I will take off a little time after Thérèse Raquin to step back a bit and rest. It will be a time to let the cisterns fill up again because they will be drained."

Check out Tobias Picker's website
tobiaspicker.com

Thérèse, Thérèse, Thérèse
upcomingmovies.com - a preview of the 2002 movie starring Kate Winslet as Thérèse
Thérèse Raquin the adultress - French Film Library information on 1953 film directed by Marcel Carné

More on Emmeline
Opera America database

and Fantastic Mr. Fox
    Los Angeles Opera - 1998 production
    Roald Dahl Fans - information on the book, play and opera
    Spaphetti Book Club - a review of the book by a young reader
     roalddahl.com - the official Roald Dahl web site

The ultimate American Tragedy website
Murder in the Adirondacks - a look at the crime's factual roots and various artistic endeavors inspired by the murder

For more information on Thérèse Raquin see also interviews with librettist Gene Scheer and director Francesca Zambello and Thérèse Raquin Fever