“I was thinking a lot about how I got to where I am,” Lucia Lucas began, speaking about her approach to assembling the program for Opera Parallèle’s upcoming concert Expansive, which features transgender and nonbinary artists. For Lucas, this program is for acknowledging the music and artists that have had a significant influence on her path, personally, professionally, and musically: “I want to name them — I want to say thank you.”
Expansive is an annual celebration of Transgender History Month put on by Opera Parallèle and San Francisco’s Transgender District. This year, they are featuring the pioneering baritone Lucia Lucas, the first openly trans opera singer to play a principal role on a U.S. stage. Joining her on Thursday, August 7 in the A.C.T.’s Toni Rembe Theater are bass-baritone Wilford Kelly and pianist Taylor Chan, along with the fabulous host Afrika America.
Lucas broke ground as a trans opera singer when she portrayed Don Giovanni with the Tulsa Opera in 2019 and has been forging ahead since. The road for her has been long, and it started utterly alone: “When I came out in 2014, there were no professional opera singers who were openly trans.” In the period after coming out, being that sole, visible example for other trans singers suddenly made her a resource to a small but growing community, “so for a while I was the contact person.” Whenever she gets emails from trans singers who want to pursue an opera career or from professionals who are thinking of coming out, Lucas says she tries to give them advice and perspective, or provide contacts who can help with specific challenges, such as the changes in vocal range trans-masculine singers experience.
The program will open with Wendy Carlos, the trans composer who wrote the iconic synth score of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), along with many works that helped popularize the synthesizer. Starting with Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, in Carlos’s distinctive synthesizer arrangement for the film’s main title, Lucas will follow with her own take on Carlos’s soundtrack, music she says connected with her in ways she could not fully understand until later in life.
“When I was growing up, I really enjoyed big Hollywood soundtracks — you know, stuff by John Williams and Danny Elfman — and it’s funny that the Clockwork Orange soundtrack specifically hit me so hard. I didn’t know who she was, and this was way before I came out, and it was just this really special connection”
Beyond Carlos, the concert will touch on the classical bedrock of Lucas’s career in German Romantic style with music by Richard Wagner and her own queer reading of portions of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise. It will also bring some queer required reading in “I’m Going Home” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (a film she described as a kind of “hall pass” for gender exploration).
Her work on this project gave Lucas ideas about further projects she wants to pursue next, including a full program surrounding Wendy Carlos and a full reimagining of Schubert’s Winterreise.
In August 2026, Lucas will portray Lili Elbe with Santa Fe Opera in Tobias Picker and Aryeh Lev Stollman’s Lili Elbe. The opera is based on the life of the Danish painter who became one of the first people to undergo gender-affirming surgeries. In addition to her role as Elbe, Lucas is a dramaturg for the production and has been deeply embedded in the creation process of this work since its beginnings in 2018.