Premiered in 1893, Engelbert Humperdinck’s* Hänsel and Gretel is the king of children’s operas. In it, Humperdinck manages to integrate two huge currents in 19th century German music. The first is the rich tradition of folk song, a deep well of melody and direct sentiment that also inspired Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, and informed their forest centred Romanticism, and kept the whole highfalutin project of German music grounded in the vernacular. The second is the gigantic music dramas of Wagner, which represented the most advanced, complex, and radically up to date music by any composer of the era. Humperdinck was a protégé of Wagner’s, and heavily involved in the first production of Wagner’s final opera Parsifal in 1882.
The result of these rich ingredients is a truly delicious confection, truly the best of both worlds, unbeatable both in its winsome tunefulness, and ravishingly lush harmony and orchestration. As some admirers have remarked, such lavishly well made beauty is really too good for children! But it’s also a tremendous amount of fun and is a great entry point into German opera. The opera’s influence was far reaching too - Richard Strauss conducted the premiere and he directly borrowed and stole from it in his operas his entire career. Dvorak’s Rusalka also owes a huge debt of gratitude to this work, not just in its superb handling of folk song in the context of 19th century symphonic music, but also in the orchestral colours and delicate evocation of the forest that Humperdinck manages.
The subject is extremely deep and potent too. Fairy tales represent some of the oldest cultural endowments that we have, and many can be traced back to sources older than the founding texts of the world’s major religions. These stories, iterated and refined endlessly through hundreds of generations of parents retelling these bed time stories to their children, represent perhaps the most profound body of knowledge that we have about how children should properly navigate the many difficulties of becoming adults.
Hansel and Gretel contains many astonishing psychological insights, mostly centred around the dangers posed by the ‘devouring’ mother (as portrayed by the witch). While their real mother is not caring enough, and, poor and at the end of her wits, sends her children out into the forest to gather berries (perhaps never to return), more pernicious for being so appealing and sweet, is the all-too-caring mother, who destroys her children through coddling. This mother, terrified of being abandoned, implicitly offers her children a deal: I will continue to provide everything for you; you can stay infantile and in a world of idle pleasures (sweets, games, relaxation) and are not required to strive to make anything of yourself in the world. In exchange, all I require is that you never leave me. This is a remarkably effective and seductive deal as it appeals to a deep desire in us for simplicity and an end to our suffering, and when this path is taken it ensures that children remain useless and impotent and ever less able to face the challenges of the world. The drawback is that it also breeds deep, dark resentment in the child for the parents and the world. This is the sort of home situation that leads to children creating elaborate revenge fantasies against a world that they are incapable of navigating - the school shootings in America are the most extreme end of this type. One of Freud’s achievements was delineating this family dynamic very vividly in his writings (in its many degrees of severity), pointing out that it is very peculiar to humans because our period of infancy and maturation is so extremely long compared to other species. But it’s all there encoded even more vividly in the story of Hansel and Gretel, hundreds of years before, in the image of the witch who lives in the house made of sweets, who ultimately desires to devour the children in her grasp.
But Hansel and Gretel do not succumb to the witch and the story offers a way out of this archetypal predicament. Indeed, just as potent as the image of the witch, is the image of the kids overcoming their situation by using their own inner resources - their instincts and cunning - to destroy the witch and steal her jewels. In Humperdinck’s opera, the children are initially a bag of impulsive desires and fears, at war with one another and their parents, but by the by degrees find a way to cooperate and overcome their individual weaknesses, and at the end the family are reunited and healed. We even get a tacked on Christian moral that reminds us that this ancient wisdom is trying to be squeezed into a very Victorian set of manners that sit uneasily with the gruesome murder that the kids have just triumphantly performed!
This all seems very heavy and dark, but the miracle of art is that it can treat deep themes with a light handed touch, and my aim with the production has been above all to entertain and tell the story with the fun and wit and clarity it deserves! Above all, I invite you to enjoy the show!
*To clear up any confusion: the 1960s pop star stole his name from the 1860s original!