ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK (1854-1921)
PRELUDE, HANSEL UND GRETEL
Humperdinck was a hard-working and prolific composer, responsible for, among other
things, twenty choral works, eight suites of incidental music and more than fifty
songs. He also wrote nine other stage works besides Hänsel und Gretel yet there is
no doubt which of these is his best-known and most successful composition. Hänsel
und Gretel is almost as popular a feature of the Christmas season as The Nutcracker
and the overture (Humperdinck preferred the Wagnerian name of Prelude) has a secure
place in the concert repertoire.
The most important event in Humperdinck's professional life was in 1880, when having
won the Mendelssohn Prize for composition, he travelled to Italy, and in Naples,
on the 9th March, he met Wagner. Both the great man and his wife seem to have taken
to the young composer: he became 'friend Humperdinck' in Cosima's diaries and he
was even allowed to write some extra music to cover a scene change in Parsifal. His
friendship with the Wagners had its effect on his own music, and if there is a precursor
to Hänsel und Gretel it is Die Meistersinger - some of the Prelude even sounds like
a quotation from Wagner's comic masterpiece.
With its appealing melodies and blithe, good-humoured character, Humperdinck's opera
deserves its popularity. Yet the story, taken by Humperdinck's librettist Adelheid
Wette from the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm, is another matter: blithe and good-humoured
it is not - a tale of two innocent children sent off into the forest by their poverty-stricken
but uncaring mother, to fall into the hands of a fearsome witch who would like to
cook them and have them for supper. True, they manage to get home, but in their absence
their mother has died, and it is hardly the kind of fairy story best suited to, say,
a six-year old's bedtime. However, Wette and Humperdinck softened the details of
this painful tale. The way he tells it, Father and mother find their way to the witch's
gingerbread house, where the children are held captive, and the family is happily
reunited, the witch perishing messily inside her own oven. She is reincarnated as
a large honey cake. All her previous victims, who had formed the cottage fence, are
restored to life.
The opera was a success from the first performance, at Weimar on the 23rd December
1893, and did especially well in Vienna a few months later. Itw as first seen in
London, sung in English, a week aftewards, and has remained in favour ever since.
Programme Notes by Paul Vaughan ©
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