Tobias Picker (b. New York City, July 18, 1954), called “our finest composer for the lyric stage” by The Wall Street Journal, is a composer of numerous works in every genre drawing performances by the world’s leading musicians, orchestras and opera houses. Picker began composing at the age of eight and studied at the Manhattan School of Music, The Juilliard School and Princeton University where his principal teachers were Charles Wuorinen, Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt. His first commissions occurred while still in his late teens and he quickly became established as one of America’s most sought-after young composers. By the age of thirty, Picker was the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Bearns Prize (Columbia University), a Charles Ives Scholarship, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He received the prestigious Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992 and was elected to lifetime membership in the Academy in 2012. Picker served as the first composer-in-residence of the Houston Symphony from 1985-90, and has served as composer-in-residence for such major international festivals as the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and the Pacific Music Festival. From 2010-2015, Picker served as Artistic Director of Opera San Antonio. In 2016, Picker was appointed Artistic Director of Tulsa Opera. The Santa Fe Opera gave the world premiere of Picker’s internationally acclaimed first opera Emmeline in 1996. [CD cover shown at left]  It was subsequently broadcast nationally on the PBS “Great Performances” series. The opera played to sold-out houses and international critical acclaim, and the opera’s premiere at New York City Opera was hailed by The New York Times as one of the ten most significant musical events of 1998. Opera Theatre of St. Louis mounted a major new production in June 2015, which garnered universal acclaim as “one of the best operas written in the past 25 years (The Wall Street Journal). Picker’s second opera, based on Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and commissioned and premiered by the Los Angeles Opera in a production starring Gerald Finley, established Picker as a composer whose appeal crosses all boundaries of age. Fantastic Mr. Fox recently completed a sold-out, three-year run at London’s Opera Holland Park, and the English Touring Opera toured the work extensively in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. OPERA San Antonio presented a new production of Fantastic Mr. Fox, created especially for the inaugural season of the Tobin Center, in September 2014. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project released the premiere recording of Fantastic Mr. Fox in its original orchestration and featuring Opera San Antonio’s acclaimed cast. A consortium of The Dallas Opera, San Diego Opera, and Opéra de Montréal commissioned Picker’s third opera, Thérèse Raquin, which was staged by Francesca Zambello. A reduced version of Thérèse Raquin was commissioned by Opera Theatre Europe and given its London premiere at Covent Garden ROH2. The reduced version has since received productions with Dicapo Opera Theatre, Long Beach Opera, Chicago Opera Theater, Boston University Opera Institute, and Microscopic Opera. The Metropolitan Opera commissioned Picker’s fourth opera, An American Tragedy, based on the novel by Theodore Dreiser (which also inspired the film A Place in the Sun). The world premiere of the opera took place at the Met in December 2005, featuring Patricia Racette, Nathan Gunn, Susan Graham, and Dolora Zajick in principal roles. The production was directed by Francesca Zambello and conducted by James Conlon. The Glimmerglass Festival gave the premiere of the revised version of An American Tragedy to wide acclaim in 2014. Picker’s fifth opera, Dolores Claiborne, based on the Stephen King novel, starred Patricia Racette and Elizabeth Futral at its world premiere presented by San Francisco Opera in September 2013. Dolores Claiborne was hailed as “a triumph” (Opera News), “the best of his five operas” (The Los Angeles Times), “a brilliant musical incarnation” (The Huffington Post) and “an unflinching addition to the repertoire” (San Francisco Chronicle). Picker’s symphonic music, including his famous tone poem Old and Lost Rivers, composed while he was composer-in-residence at the Houston Symphony, has been commissioned and performed by major orchestras around the world such as the BBC Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, L’Orchestre de Paris, Munich Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Vienna RSO, and Zurich Tonhalle. His second piano concerto, Keys to the City (commissioned by the City of New York on the occasion of the centenary of the Brooklyn Bridge) is a perennial favorite, called “a vivid musical portrait of New York” by The New York Times and recorded by Jeremy Denk on Chandos [CD back-insert shown at right], along with his Cello Concerto and the orchestral work And Suddenly It’s Evening. The Encantadas (for actor and orchestra) features texts drawn from Herman Melville’s poetic descriptions of the Galapagos Islands and was recorded by the Houston Symphony with Sir John Gielgud; it has been performed throughout the world in seven languages. In addition to his five operas, Picker’s catalogue includes four symphonies, four piano concertos, concertos for violin, viola, cello and oboe, song cycles, string quartets, and chamber music. His ballet Awakenings, based on the themes and case studies in the novel of the same name by neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, was commissioned by the Rambert Dance Company, which toured the work throughout the UK in 2011, performing it 80 times. His extensive discography has been recorded on such labels as Nonesuch, Sony Classics, Virgin Classics, Chandos, Ondine, and Albany Records. Most recently, Wergo and Tzadik have devoted complete albums to Picker’s chamber music spanning the years 1976 to 2011, including the album Invisible Lilacs released by Tzadik in March 2014. Picker’s first four operas received new productions in the 2014-2015 season at The Glimmerglass Festival (An American Tragedy), Opera San Antonio (Fantastic Mr. Fox), Opera Theatre of St. Louis (Emmeline), Chicago Opera Theater and Long Beach Opera (Thérèse Raquin). Called “seductive yet enigmatic” by The Washington Post, Picker’s large-scale orchestral work Opera Without Words received its world premiere with the National Symphony Orchestra in 2016, conducted by Christoph Eschenbach. In 2017, the New York City opera premiered the chamber version of Dolores Claiborne, and the National Symphony Orchestra celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of Old and Lost Rivers with performances of the work at the Kennedy Center and on tour in Moscow and St. Petersburg at the Mstislav Rostropovich Festival. In 2018, Picker led the Signature Symphony in a performance of arias from his operas, including "The Ghost Aria" and "The Seine Moves Like a Melody" from Thérèse Raquin and "The Letter Aria" and "Love Duet" from Emmeline. which have subsequently been made available as stand-alone concert works for voice(s) and orchestra. Tobias Picker’s music is published exclusively worldwide by Schott Helicon Music Corporation. ==  Biography from the website of Schott Music   ==  Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website.  BD

In March of 1994, Tobias Picker was in Chicago for performances with the Chicago Symphony of his Old and Lost Rivers, led by Christoph Eschenbach.  The day before the first performance, the composer was gracious enough to allow me to visit him at his hotel for an interview.  At times the conversation ranged from the humorous to the incredibly deep, but through it all, Picker was thoughtful and thorough in his responses to my questions.

Portions of the chat were aired on WNIB, Classical 97, to celebrate his 40th and 45th birthdays, and now, nearly 30 years later (in mid-2023), I am pleased present the entire encounter . . . . .


Bruce Duffie:   I will be doing a program to celebrate your upcoming 40th birthday.  Do you have any thoughts on being four-oh?

Tobias Picker:   I’m looking forward to it, actually.  I hated turning 39, but I’m where I want to be at the moment, at 40, and I feel comfortable with where I am and who I am.  Maybe turning 40 has something to do with that.

BD:   Does it give you a sense of security in your work?

Picker:   Maybe, or just a sense of having some tiny little place in the big, gigantic scheme of things.  You never know if you’re ever going to find your own place, and I feel very lucky, at almost 40, to feel as though I have whatever that means.

BD:   When you say the

play your own music, or the music of the masters, it gives you some hope that maybe it will survive.

BD:   Should this concert music that we’re talking about be for everyone on the planet?

Picker:   Nothing is for everyone.  There are different musics for different cultures.  We may not live to see it, but I imagine there may come a time when it’s all merged into one homogenized thing.  There may be composers making an effort to do that now, but I don’t believe there are.  Different cultures in different parts of the world have different musical traditions.  We were speaking of the Western European musical tradition, which was carried forth to this continent, but no, I don’t think it’s for everyone on the planet.  Abe Lincoln knew what he was talking about when he said that you can fool some of the people some of the time, et cetera, et cetera.  Not that anybody is fooling anyone, but you can change it around to say that you can gratify some of the people all the time and all of them some of the time, but not all of them all the time.  It shouldn’t be expected.  It’s always nice to see someone who grew up on Jimi Hendrix, and Beatles, and Stones, and Led Zeppelin suddenly discover the joys of Stravinsky, but I’m afraid I’m not a proselytizer as far as trying to get the entire human race to the box office window.

BD:   Should the composer be at all concerned with the economic issues?

Picker:   The composer has no choice but to be concerned with the economic issues if he’s functioning in this economic climate.  If he has to pay his bills, sure, he should be concerned.  What can we do?  I guess education is the key.

BD:   Are you also teaching music as well as composing?

Picker:   I teach a bit privately upon request.  If a young aspiring composer has heard my music, and then thinks that he or she can benefit by talking to me about their music, then I talk to them about it, and I look at it, and study it with them.  We study music, and that’s a very rarefied kind of teaching.  I don’t go into the public schools, though I applaud the noble efforts of some of my colleagues who do that.

BD:   Do you have any advice for young composers coming along?

Picker:   No.

BD:   Do you encourage them to keep on with their music, or do you encourage them to get out of music?

Picker:   Oh, I don’t encourage them to get out.  If they have talent, I encourage them to take it very, very seriously, and think very seriously about what they’re getting themselves into, because it’s not easy.  It’s very difficult.  A composer I admired as a child very much was Gian Carlo Menotti.  Every year at Christmastime, the Hallmark Hall of Fame presented Amahl and the Night Visitors on television.  That was my first exposure to contemporary music, and I looked forward to it every year.  I just loved it.  Even my sister and brother and I put on our own little performance of Amahl as a surprise for our parents when they came back from a trip.  I played Kaspar, one of the three visiting kings, who had a box which had drawers in it, and each drawer had a special thing inside.  One had jewels, another had magic stones, and the last one had licorice, long, black, shiny licorice.  That was my role.  When I was eight or nine, we had a little private unauthorized production of that.  [Sighs]  I’ll probably get a bill now from the Menotti Publishers.  [Both laugh]  So, I admired Menotti, and I wrote him a letter when I was eight.  I said that I’d written a few pieces, and that I would like to meet him and that I admired him.  He wrote back to me, which is a great big thrill for an eight-year-old, as you can imagine, and he said he’d love to meet me, but that he was sailing at the time for France for the new production of an opera he had just finished, and when he got back we would meet and he would look at my music.  But I was ashamed to show him what I had written at the time.  I didn’t think there was much there to show him, so I never followed it up.  I didn’t learn how to follow up until much later in life.  That’s my advice to young composers

BD:   Let’s talk a little bit about the idea of composing.  When you’re sitting at the desk and you’ve got a page that’s partly blank and partly filled in, you’ve got the pencil in your hand and you’re putting notes down.  Are you always controlling where that pencil goes, or are there times when the pencil leads you across the page?

Picker:   There are times when the music writes itself.  I compose at a piano a lot, and now I also use a synthesizer, my most recent compositional tool.  I’m an improviser, so despite rigorous training in form and analysis and serial techniques that I learned from my teacher, I simultaneously worked as a professional improviser for Martha Graham for dance.  I spent many years improvising music that would inspire people to move through space, and doing this through some musical structure given to me by the preset structure of the Graham technique.  The years of improvisation have served me well all this time.  So there are some pieces of mine which have quite literally written themselves, and there are other pieces I’ve sweated over every note.  Still other pieces have been very carefully planned from beginning to end, as much as one can do such a thing, with every parameter covered as much as possible.  A piece like Old and Lost Rivers simply wrote itself, and the vocal movement of my Second Symphony almost wrote itself.  I had to help it a little, but those are things that went very quickly.

BD:   Was that a little different because you were dealing with a text?  Did the words help to lead you on?

Picker:   No, it was harder with setting it for voice.  In The Encantadas, I wrote the music and then I figured out what words would go with the music.  I hope that the gods of opera don’t strike me down dead for saying so, but the opera that I’m writing now I’m approaching the same way.

BD:   Music first, then text???

Picker:   I’m writing the music that I think expresses what the text is supposed to express, and then I’ll figure out how the text should be set in the music.  This is exactly the opposite from what most conventional wisdom is about how to write an opera.  Benjamin Britten didn’t write a note until the libretto was completely finished.

BD:   You have an idea about the text, so you know where it’s going.  But then you’re going to fashion it around the music?

Picker:   Yes, so that the music will convey the action and the emotions, whether or not you can hear the words... although I want the words to be heard.  [Laughs]  An opera is not an oration.  It’s a piece of music and more, but sometimes one has a big piece like The Encantadas, one starts certain parts of it from the point of view of the text, and other parts from the point of view of just pure music.  But I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules.

BD:   When you’re starting out, do you know the length of time it will take to perform the music?

Picker:   I know what the contract says it’s supposed to do, and I try to stick with that.  I try to pace myself and to estimate it, yes.

BD:   When you get an offer, how do you decide if you’ll accept it and sign the contract, or turn it aside and do something else?

Picker:   That’s a very tricky question, and it has a very changeable answer depending on circumstances and how busy one is.  I don’t like to turn down any.  I don’t like to say no to anyone who wants music.  I suppose I have when I’ve had too many other things to do.  Then, since there are evidently musicians who value my music, I have to take into account financial considerations, crass as that may strike the listener.  Forgive me.

BD:   We don’t want to starve the composer.

Picker:   Oh, sure we do!  Our society does not like to think of composers as living well.  They should suffer.

BD:   [Gently protesting]  Maybe not driving around in a Rolls Royce, but certainly not living in a box on the street!

Picker:   Well, somewhere in between, maybe.  Maybe we should all be living in the men’s shelter at Port Washington Avenue.  [Snickers]  I once had a very famous concertmaster say to me,

BD:   Let me turn the conversation back to your music.  Have you basically been pleased with the performances you’ve heard of your works over the years?

Picker:   Yes, basically I have.  I’ve been very lucky with performances.  They have been very good performances, for the most part.  We have extraordinary musicians today, and I’ve been blessed with some of the best musicians to play my music.  Now we’re living through a period in which some of the concert stars are beginning to take an interest in new music.  They are commissioning it and performing it, so not only myself but my colleagues are reaping the benefits of writing for extraordinary musicians.  Sometimes this works out very well, and sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes the concert star is very disappointed in the piece that gets written for him or her.  They get the piece, and then they decide they don’t like it, and they don’t want to play it.  [This is nothing new.  Perhaps the most famous examples are Paganini encouraging Berlioz to write Harold in Italy, and then rejecting it.  Later, the Walton Viola Concerto, written in 1929 at the suggestion of Sir Thomas Beecham, was rejected by Lionel Tertis, and was premiered by Paul Hindemith.]

© 1994 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded in in Chicago on March 9, 1994.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB four months later, and again in 1999.  This transcription was made in 2023, and posted on this website at that time.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.  To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.