Picker met Sacks at a dinner party in the early nineties, having engineered an introduction so that he could get the doctor’s opinion on his own tics. “We based this on the Grimms’ version, which was much darker than in Disney.” When the piano stopped, a mezzo-soprano singing the part of a patient named Miriam reminded the cast to lock the wheelchairs. “Sleeping Beauty was actually a very tragic story,” Picker said. Twenty chorus members surrounded them, recounting the story of Sleeping Beauty in a sombre lilt: “Our days fade into weeks and years. / Your time is not like time to us. / We all cry unseen tears.” Three of the warehoused patients were being maneuvered in wheelchairs, singing softly, clutching at thin lap blankets, and occasionally convulsing. Picker, sixty-eight, has a Roman nose and salt-and-pepper curls, and he made notes on his score as the cast rehearsed a prologue set in a hospital dayroom. The opera’s East Coast première is this week, at the Huntington Theatre. The story, about a group of patients immobilized by encephalitis lethargica in a Bronx hospital in the sixties, had already inspired a Harold Pinter play and an Oscar-nominated film. He was presiding over a run-through of an opera that he adapted from “Awakenings,” the 1973 book by his late friend the neurologist Oliver Sacks. “It’s like a fairy tale, the whole thing,” the composer Tobias Picker said the other day, standing in a Boston rehearsal studio.
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