Engelbert Humperdinck

Engelbert Humperdinck (1854–1921) was a German composer remembered above all for one work, the fairy-tale opera Hänsel und Gretel. Born in Siegburg in the Rhineland, he wrote his first music as a child, entered the Cologne Conservatory in 1872 against his parents’ wishes and continued his studies in Munich from 1876. In 1879 he was among the first winners of the Mendelssohn Award and used it to travel to Italy, where he met Richard Wagner in Naples. Wagner invited him to Bayreuth, and Humperdinck assisted with the preparation of Parsifal and taught music to Wagner’s son Siegfried. Years of teaching followed, in Barcelona and Frankfurt among other places, before the success of Hänsel und Gretel in 1893 made him famous almost overnight. He later taught composition in Berlin, where Kurt Weill was among his pupils, and wrote further stage works, notably Königskinder, which in its first version called for a kind of delivery halfway between speech and song. A stroke in 1912 left his left hand paralysed, though he went on composing.