Into the Woodsiness

Most composers living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side would be hard pressed to tell one wooded area from another, but for Tobias Picker, those little distinctions have become crucial.

The rural backdrop for “Emmeline,” his first opera and his most acclaimed work to date, may share a passing resemblance to that of “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” his musical setting of the Roald Dahl story, which opens this week at L.A. Opera, but its emotional landscape is a world removed.

As reconceived by Picker and librettist-director Donald Sturrock, Dahl’s children’s tale is a modern fable of good versus evil, animal versus human, nature versus technology. The first world premiere of an American opera to take place in Los Angeles, “Mr. Fox” follows its title character as he outwits his enemies (Boggis, Bunce and Bean--one fat, one short, one lean) and keeps his family safe with the help of his fellow creatures in the forest. Picker’s human touches culminate in a touching duet between Miss Hedgehog and Porcupine at the end of the opera, and of course a fox-trot for Mr. and Mrs. Fox.

The human emotions of “Emmeline,” on the other hand, were considerably more extreme. Based on the true-life tragedy of Emmeline Mosher, the story recalls a 19th century textile worker seduced by her boss and shunned by her rural New England town. Years later when she falls in love with a young drifter, she discovers that the man is the son she was forced to give up at birth.

Much of the strength of “Emmeline” came from Picker’s ability to bring tragedy of epic Greek proportion--both musically and dramatically--to the girl next door. Having debuted to international acclaim at Santa Fe Opera in 1996, “Emmeline” was broadcast on PBS’ “Great Performances” the next year and received its East Coast premiere at New York City Opera in 1998.

“City Opera should put ‘Emmeline’ in its permanent repertory,” wrote New York Times critic Bernard Holland during its run in New York. “It’s a model of its kind.”

“Writing ‘Emmeline’ was such a traumatic experience that I needed to do something totally different,” Picker says. “ ‘Mr. Fox’ is different in that it’s not a tragedy. It’s comic, although it has some poignant moments. It’s even more tuneful than ‘Emmeline,’ but it’s also quite bizarre, in keeping with the bizarre aspects of the story.”

Although the 45-year-old Picker had turned 40 before undertaking his first opera, in retrospect that direction seems inevitable. Even before he discovered music at age 7, Picker was creating and recounting stories.

“I had a very solitary childhood, with several imaginary friends who were part of my life,” says the composer, who grew up in then-rural Westchester County, north of New York City, as the youngest of three children. “I would plan out these elaborate events, even to the point where when we had dinner my parents would learn their names and set the table for them. One of my imaginary friends died and I made my brother come to the funeral. He thought it was strange, but he played along.”

Perhaps because his mother was an oil painter and his father a theater critic who aspired to be a playwright, Picker’s parents indulged their children’s creative fantasies. “I remember when I was alone, I would run around outside improvising opera,” he says. “Maybe it was because we actually saw opera on television in those days. My grandfather was a great lover of Wagner, so I found myself drawn to it at a very early age.”

Not so in his professional career, which began with chamber works marked by astringent harmonies and rhythmic drive, with a fondness for serialism that reveals his study with composer Charles Wuorinen in the mid-1970s and Milton Babbitt at the end of the decade.

For Picker, the road to opera came in a series of successive steps. His Second Piano Concerto, “Keys to the City,” commissioned for the 1983 centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge, was a major step in embracing the American musical idiom, in this case boogie-woogie piano styles. His “Encantadas” from 1983 for actor and orchestra, based on a text by Herman Melville, was the first to incorporate expressly dramatic content.

Between 1978 and 1992, Picker wrote eight songs, one of which he later orchestrated as the climactic moment in his Symphony No. 2. His “Rain in the Trees” in 1993 expanded his vocal writing to new levels and pointed the way toward “Emmeline,” which he began writing the next year. With or without a text, however, Picker harnesses his music in service to a story.

“I once spent six months writing a six-minute piano piece for Peter Serkin,” he recalls. “I wanted one person at the piano to express the point of view of many, many characters. The thing I love about opera is that I can tell a story with music, and the story is out there for everyone to see, where with abstract music, the program is always more personal. My Second Symphony, for example, has a program, which I’ve never discussed, because I felt the piece needs to stand on its own.”

From the time Picker turned toward vocal music, he also turned from the city toward a new home in Rhinebeck, N.Y., returning to the rural surroundings of his youth. Where “Keys to the City” was filled with the sounds of the Upper West Side, “Emmeline,” and now “Fantastic Mr. Fox” are filled with the woods. Picker says that he knows every tree on his property as well as he knows his neighbors in New York. Although Picker still keeps his New York apartment, he composes only at his Rhinebeck home.

“I would say that my setting is very conducive to what I write,” he says. “The little studio where I wrote ‘Emmeline’ is about the same size--maybe a little bigger--than Emmeline’s house, and I wanted to feel the isolation.”

The writing process itself, though, took an emotional toll. “I was very happy writing ‘Emmeline,’ although when I orchestrated it I became very upset because I had to live through all those tragic situations in order to color them all,” Picker says. “Whereas with ‘Mr. Fox’ I’m composing in full orchestration from the beginning. Partly it’s because there’s a happy ending, but some pieces are just extremely difficult. You have to get inside the character’s skin in order to write.”

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The subject of “Emmeline” was generated by Picker himself and was close to his heart from the beginning. By contrast, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” was already well in motion when Picker joined the creative team.

The work is the brainchild of its librettist and director, Donald Sturrock, a former BBC writer-director whose fascination with Dahl first found its way into his own work in a short television documentary in 1985. “I admired and later got to know him as a friend,” Sturrock says. “We were never terribly close, but we did see each other occasionally and got on quite well.”

So well that by the time Sturrock left the BBC full time in 1992 to pursue more diverse creative projects, Dahl’s widow Liccy offered him an artistic directorship in the Roald Dahl Foundation to commission musical works based on her late husband’s stories. His first projects involved semi-staged Dahl narrations from composers Paul Patterson, Kurt Schwertsick, Peter Ash and George Pelecise.

Both sides of Sturrock’s life converged two years later when he was in Los Angeles filming a documentary of tenor Placido Domingo, who was conducting a production of “La Boheme.” Having already worked on a number of semi-staged Dahl narrations orchestrated by European composers, Sturrock first broached the subject of commissioning a full-length opera with L.A. Opera General Director Peter Hemmings.

“It was important for Peter to have an American composer,” says Sturrock, who found himself in the audience with Liccy Dahl for opening night of “Emmeline” in Santa Fe in the summer of 1996.

“Emmeline was tonally attractive, yet seriously well crafted, which is quite rare,” Sturrock says. “Also, it had that essential connection of music to drama, which was also quite rare.”

By the end of the year, Hemmings and Sturrock had invited Picker to join the project. Not only could Picker make the 1998 deadline Sturrock proposed, he was itching for another project. “The freshness of the libretto just sparked something,” he recalls. “Maybe it was because I wanted to do something completely different, maybe because Donald had tweaked the story a bit so that it hits the audience on an adult level as well. But the word rhythms were infectious and there was an openness in the libretto that I felt that music could fill.”

This time, he says, the woods that provided the essential isolation he needed to write “Emmeline” have become a virtual social whirl.

“Lots of things go on in the forest that you’re not aware of at first,” he says. “You may not see anything, but the space under a rock is crawling with life, and you can hear the coyotes at night.”

Work on “Mr. Fox” took up the bulk of last year, he says, except for breaks to write two short pieces and to supervise the recording of “Emmeline” for Albany Records. After the Dahl opera concludes its run this month, Picker plans to look toward his next project, a solo suite for cellist Lynn Harrell, and “to pick up a lot of the things that got put on hold in my life.”

Soon, though, his efforts will turn toward his next work for the stage, a commission from the Metropolitan Opera due in 2002, for which he plans to change gears again and return to a more serious subject. Though he refuses to discuss any details, he does admit that the subject matter concerns murder.

“When each opera ceases to be new to me, that’s when I’ll stop,” he says. “Right now I want to plan out the future so that each one approaches a new level. I want to cover all the Ten Commandments and the seven deadly sins, if I live that long.”