HANSEL AND GRETEL BACKGROUND NOTES
Engelbert Humperdinck's masterpiece Hansel and Gretel is a supreme example of a genre which had enormous success in 19th-century Germany: Märchenoper, or fairy-tale opera. Not necessarily involving fairies, and for the most part not operas for children, these are allegories built on the powerful contest between good and evil, an adult theme which lies at the heart of most serious theater art in almost every culture. Influences of Märchenoper are to be found in the importance of the supernatural in such varied works as Weber's Oberon and Wagner's Siegfried.
The reference to Richard Wagner is more than coincidental, for Humperdinck was for years an important assistant to the composer of Der Ring des Nibelungen and devoted to the operatic revolution which Wagner had created. Opera was clearly in the blood of young Humperdinck, who made his first attempt at writing one at the age of 14. Although his family tried to divert his attention to architecture and away from music (the very dilemma facing Wagner's son Siegfried some years later when his tutor was Humperdinck), the boy persisted in winning prizes in music composition. One of these, the Mendelssohn Prize of Berlin, led to his first visit to Italy, where he met - and evidently impressed - Wagner.
A period spent at Bayreuth, helping prepare the first performance of Parsifal, resulted in a close relationship with Wagner and, inevitably, absorption of the master's technique and style. Striking out on his own, Humperdinck traveled and taught in Cologne, Paris and Barcelona, returning to Germany as Siegfried Wagner's tutor before moving to Frankfurt, where he was the opera critic for the Frankfurter Zeitung.
Although the story later developed by anonymous writers began to take shape in the Middle Ages, the opera we now know as Hansel and Gretel began life as song settings for Humperdinck's sister's 1890 stage production of the Grimm version of the fairy tale. The result was so successful that she immediately asked him to write the complete opera. At 36, and having spent years with Wagner, Humperdinck was all too familiar with the heavy responsibility such a task involved (and perhaps was unwilling to devote so much work to a mere fairy tale) and agreed only to write some more music for a Singspiel (a play with music) version of the piece. However, by 1893, a full opera was complete and scheduled for performance at the Hoftheater in Weimar, a theatre known for its presentations of new German operas, including Wagner's Lohengrin.
The conductor of the premiere was none other than Richard Strauss, who proclaimed the work a "great occasion," an opinion soon shared by Gustav Mahler, who called it a "masterpiece." The opera was an immediate success in Berlin and Vienna, and was the Christmas season's hit in London. In its first year, Hansel and Gretel had over 50 productions and a touring company was formed, a sure sign of enduring popularity.
Nothing Humperdinck wrote subsequently, not even the superb Königskinder (produced at Sarasota Opera in 1997), attained the level of this opera, although songs, pantomimes, and excellent incidental music for the legendary Max Reinhardt's productions of Shakespeare's plays followed. Nonetheless, Humperdinck's music was always centered on the human voice, always influenced by folksong (although almost never quoting directly from that tradition), always superbly crafted, both harmonically and dramatically.
