Kirill Petrenko Conducts Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel

About the Work

Hänsel und Gretel began as a family entertainment. In 1890 Humperdinck’s sister, Adelheid Wette, was writing a little play on the Grimm fairy tale for her children to perform, and she asked her brother to set a few of its verses to music. He obliged with a handful of songs. Then the idea would not let him go. The songs grew into a play with music and spoken dialogue, and over the next two years, working in Frankfurt, he turned that into a full opera with a Wagnerian orchestra.

Humperdinck was nearly forty and had never written an opera. He had, though, served the best apprenticeship available: as a young man he had been invited to Bayreuth by Wagner himself and had assisted with the preparation of Parsifal. What he took from Wagner is audible on every page of the score, in the rich orchestration, the continuous musical flow and the way themes recur and are developed in the orchestra. What makes the opera his own is that he applied all this to tunes that sound like nursery songs, and in two cases are.

Richard Strauss conducted the first performance at the Court Theatre in Weimar on 23 December 1893. The success was immediate. Within a year the opera had been taken up by dozens of German theatres, and it soon travelled abroad. Because of the date of its premiere, and no doubt the gingerbread, it has been a Christmas piece ever since. The Berliner Philharmoniker present it, unseasonably, at the end of May.

Adelheid Wette softened the Grimms’ story considerably. In the original the parents abandon their children in the forest to die. In the opera an exasperated mother, who has just spilled the family’s supper, sends them out to pick strawberries, and both parents rush after them in horror when they realise where the children have gone. Wette also added the Sandman and the Dew Fairy, and the angels who guard the sleeping children. Even the witch’s victims fare better: she bakes children into gingerbread, and at the end they are brought back to life.

The roles are distributed in a way that surprises newcomers. Hänsel is sung by a mezzo-soprano and Gretel by a soprano, both adult singers who have to ride a large orchestra. The witch was written for a mezzo-soprano but is sometimes given to a tenor, as it is here.

These performances are staged in the Philharmonie, with stage direction by Matthias Davids and sets and costumes by Andrew D. Edwards. They form part of the celebrations for 25 years of the orchestra’s education programme, and the children’s chorus is sung by the Vokalhelden, the choir drawn from that programme. The orchestra recommends the evening for children aged six and over.

The Story

Act I. Hänsel and Gretel, the children of a poor broom-maker, are alone at home, hungry and supposed to be working. They dance instead. Their mother, Gertrud, comes home, loses her temper, knocks over the jug of milk that was to be supper and sends them into the forest for strawberries. The father, Peter, arrives in high spirits with a sack of food, having sold all his brooms. When he hears where the children are he is appalled: the Gingerbread Witch lives in that forest. The parents hurry out to find them.

Act II. In the forest the children have eaten the strawberries they picked, and night is falling. They are lost and frightened. The Sandman appears and sprinkles sand in their eyes; they say their evening prayer and fall asleep, and fourteen angels come down to keep watch.

Act III. The Dew Fairy wakes them. In front of them stands a house made of cake and sweets, and they begin to nibble at it. The witch catches them, shuts Hänsel in a cage to fatten him and sets Gretel to work. When she asks Gretel to look into the oven, Gretel pretends not to understand, and when the witch demonstrates, the children push her in. The oven explodes, the gingerbread children around the house come back to life, and the parents arrive for the final thanksgiving.

What to Listen For

The prelude. It opens with four horns playing the melody of the children’s evening prayer, and it ends with the same music. In between come several of the opera’s other themes, woven together with great skill.

Folk songs, real and invented. The first song of the opera, “Suse, liebe Suse”, is a genuine German nursery song, and Humperdinck treats it as Wagner would a leitmotif, developing it in the orchestra. Most of the other tunes that sound traditional are his own, among them the dance duet “Brüderchen, komm tanz mit mir” and the father’s drinking song with its “Ral-la-la-la” refrain. The second act opens with the score’s other authentic folk song, Gretel’s “Ein Männlein steht im Walde”, which is a riddle: the little man in the wood with the red coat and black cap is a rosehip.

The Witch’s Ride. The orchestral interlude between the first two acts, based on the broomstick music from the father’s account of the witch. This is Humperdinck at his most Wagnerian, and its wild string writing owes something to the “Ride of the Valkyries”.

Evening Prayer and Dream Pantomime. The children’s duet “Abends will ich schlafen gehn” is the best-known music in the opera. The orchestra then takes up the tune alone and builds it into a long, radiant interlude as the angels descend.

The witch. Listen for her galloping broomstick song, “Hurr hopp hopp”.

The ending. The children dance their jig from the first act, and in the closing bars everyone joins the father in his motto, that when need is greatest God stretches out his hand, sung to the melody of the Evening Prayer with which the prelude began.