ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK
HANSEL & GRETEL
CONTENTS
P.
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SYNOPSIS P.
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THOUGHTS ON TONE PAINTING ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK P.
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LIKE WALKING THROUGH NEW SNOW INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTIAN THIELEMANN P.
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THROUGH A MAGIC DOOR INTO THE STORY INTERVIEW WITH ADRIAN NOBLE P.
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A MAGICAL WORLD INTERVIEW WITH ANTHONY WARD
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“A FIRST-RATE MASTERPIECE” WALTER DOBNER P.
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SPEAKING OF GINGERBREAD PAULUS HOCHGATTERER P.
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HÄNSEL UND GRETEL AT THE WIENER STAATSOPER ANDREAS LÁNG P.
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HOCUS POCUS CHRISTA LUDWIG P.
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IMPRINT
ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK
HANSEL & GRETEL FAIRY-TALE OPERA in three acts Text by ADELHEID WETTE
ORCHESTRA
STAGE ORCHESTRA
1 piccolo / 2 flutes 2 oboes / 1 cor anglais 2 clarinets / 1 bass clarinet 2 bassoons / 4 horns 2 trumpets / 3 trombones 1 bass tuba / percussion thunder machine / bells 1 harp / violin 1 / violin 2 viola / cello / double bass 1 cuckoo instrument
AUTOGRAPH
Municipal and University Library Frankfurt/Main WORLD PREMIÈRE 23 DECEMBER 1893 Court Theatre, Weimar PREMIÈRE IN VIENNA 18 DECEMBER 1894 Vienna Court Opera DURATION
2 H 15 MIN
INCL. 1 INTERMISSION
HÄNSEL UND GRETEL
SYNOPSIS OVERTURE London, Christmas circa 1890. A Victorian family gathers happily in the living room around the Christmas tree. The father surprises everyone with a mysterious, new device: a laterna magica, which projects all kinds of unfamiliar and wonderful pictures on the wall and also opens the door to a strange, fairytale world...
ACT 1 Instead of carrying out the chores assigned to them, tormented by hunger, the siblings Hänsel and Gretel pass the time in the wretched hut that is their home by singing and dancing. They eagerly await the evening and with it the return of their parents, because today there will finally be something to eat before they go to bed: the children hope that their Mother will make a rice pudding using the milk given to them by a neighbour. But when the Mother finally comes home, the mood changes abruptly. Furious that Hänsel and Gretel have spent their time playing together rather than making brooms and knitting stockings, she rushes over to the children to give them a beating. In doing so, she accidentally knocks the jug with the milk in it off the table. Hänsel’s snickering at her clumsiness, the jug fragments on the floor and the spilled milk cause the Mother to lose her temper, and she sends the children out into the nearby forest to pick strawberries. Left alone, she laments the poverty and hunger her family suffers and drops wearily off to sleep. Awakened by her cheery, somewhat drunken husband, who for once has been able to sell all his brooms and has bought a big supply of various groceries with the proceeds. But their joy is short-lived. Dismayed that his children have been sent out alone, the Father tells his wife about the man-eating Witch who lives in Ilsenstein, a particularly dark and notorious part of the forest. Filled with concern, the parents rush out of the hut to find Hänsel and Gretel before nightfall and bring them home.
Previous pages: SCENE
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SYNOPSIS
ACT 2 While Hänsel picks strawberries, filling his basket to the brim, Gretel makes a wreath. Happy that this time they have done as their Mother asked, they become absorbed in all kinds of games and forget to go home on time. To make matters even worse, before they realize what they are doing, the two of them gradually eat all the strawberries they had collected. Horrified, they set out to look for more, but notice full of trepidation that they have got lost in the evening darkness of the forest. The good Sandman then appears and sprinkles sand in their eyes. Huddled together, Hänsel and Gretel go to sleep after saying their evening prayers. In a beautiful dream, fourteen angels hover around them, and they have a reassuring sense of death and new life.
ACT 3 The next morning, Hänsel and Gretel are awakened by the Dew Fairy and discover the Witch’s gingerbread house. When Hänsel breaks off a piece, the Witch’s voice is heard from within the house. However, since nothing more threatening happens, the children start to nibble at the house, until the Witch emerges. At first she seems to be friendly, but she soon reveals her true colours: she casts a spell on Hänsel and Gretel and locks Hänsel in a cage, where she plans to fatten him up. In exuberant anti cipation of eating the children, the Witch clambers onto her broomstick and for some time flies ecstatically through the air. After her ride, she tries to persuade Gretel to look into the oven. Her plan to push the unsuspecting girl into the oven and bake her into gingerbread does not succeed; warned by her brother, Gretel pretends to be stupid and asks the Witch to show her how to look into the oven. Impatiently, the Witch agrees to Gretel’s request and leans far into the oven. At that moment, Hänsel and Gretel push her in, and she perishes miserably. The witch has only just died when the many gingerbread men stand ing around the house turn into boys and girls. They all fell into the Witch’s trap and were turned into gingerbread in the oven: but now the spell is broken. Hänsel and Gretel are able to free the children from the final spell with the help of the magic wand. The grateful children dance joyously around their rescuers. A little later, Hänsel and Gretel’s parents find the happy group, having been searching for their children through the night. Grateful and filled with joy they sing together: “When our need is at its greatest, the Lord our God holds out his hand.”
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ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK
THOUGHTS ON TONE PAINTING The essence of tone painting lies in depicting natural processes and states (including human life) in accordance with the stylistic laws defined in music. – On the one hand, through more or less faithful reproduction of the sounds peculiar to the processes in question, on the other hand by the association of ideas that can be speculative or spontaneous. In the first case the composer follows his own observations (storm, wind, waves, thunder, etc.) or those that have gradually become established in our art, namely opera (depiction of a forest with horns, idyll, etc.); the second case arises in depictions not related to things we hear directly, but to the way our mood is altered by different phenomena (such as the face or emotion), in which case one perception is transferred to the other, the external to the internal (disposition). (Example: Lightning in the Pastoral Sym phony, mirror in Siegfried.) Engelbert Humperdinck, Thoughts on tone painting, 1880
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ILEANA TONCA as GRETEL DANIELA SINDRAM as HÄNSEL
CONDUCTOR CHRISTIAN THIELEMANN IN AN INTERVIEW WITH OLIVER LÁNG
LIKE WALKING THROUGH NEW SNOW ol
As a copyist of the score of Parsifal and musical assistant to Wagner at the première of the work, Humperdinck gained some insight into Wagner’s work through Parsifal. Does that come through in Hänsel und Gretel? ct There are hints of it. More than Parsifal, I hear Die Meistersinger wafting through the entire piece. And interestingly enough the same problems arise with Hänsel und Gretel as do with Die Meistersinger, namely the orchestra tends to be too loud. Yet the opera is not heavily orchestrated, it just has to be played very sparingly. That is not the case with Parsifal. No matter whether you put on Parsifal in a normal opera house or in Bayreuth, it is seldom too loud. In Parsifal, Wagner created the ideal composition for voice and orchestra. With other works, you have to watch the dynamics like a hawk. And like Die Meistersinger, Hän sel und Gretel needs a lightness and also biting humour, a certain ease. We should not forget: despite everything that happens, it is still a fairy tale. And
that is something we have to take into account. ol There are also similarities to Brahms. Is Humperdinck the connection between the worlds of Brahms and Wagner? ct I would say the Wagnerian influence is stronger. ol To what extent do you notice from the score that Humperdinck was himself a good conductor? ct First of all, the opera is very demanding for the conductor because of the many ritenutos and the subtle transitions you then need to make. But you do notice that he had a great understanding of conducting from the way the opera is woven together. In this connection, we should not forget that Richard Strauss conducted the world première, someone who knew exactly where to pull back and where he could give a little more. ol In other words, you can conduct Hänsel und Gretel from Strauss’s perspective? ct Absolutely! Just like Die Meistersin ger, with Hänsel und Gretel approaching
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the work as Strauss did is the right approach. ol Meaning? ct That you cannot allow yourself to be carried away by every forte and fortissimo. You have to keep it in check, but nevertheless played beautifully and opulently. A balancing act between joy, a big sound and a fine edge. ol Three comments by Richard Strauss on this opera. Firstly, he referred to the piece as “truly German”. Is Hänsel und Gretel “truly German”? In what regard? ct Hänsel und Gretel takes place in Germany, it is a German fairy tale. That is what Strauss will have meant. Outside Germany, very few people know where Ilsenstein is. ol And in terms of the music? ct He is talking about the style. It refers to a large extent back to Mendelssohn Bartholdy. And, if you like, there is also a bit of Schubert in the singability of the opera, a folk songlike singability. There’s something of Schubert Lieder in it. ol These simple song-like moments: do you just leave them or do you exaggerate them to some extent? ct It is rather the reverse: the opera as a whole should not become too big! One should actually view the entire opera as a kind of folk song and shape it with a certain simplicity – although of course the piece is not simple – with a kind of straightforward air, a relaxed narrative style. And the weighty sections will come out, you don’t have to add anything... As I said earlier: keep checking that it isn’t too loud and too dense, if for no other reason than for the singers’ sake.
Strauss comment number two: “Devilishly difficult, that little Hänsel”. ct Good grief! It really is devilishly difficult, if you want to perform it properly! But when you have a firstclass orchestra playing it, you can hear something truly magnificent! The subtleties, the joy in a little bit of kitsch, in little glissandi in the violins. ol Hugo Wolf diagnosed Hänsel und Gretel as having operetta qualities in some parts. Is he on the mark there? ct Absolutely. I think that is a compliment! Because operetta is the most difficult thing of all! You have to meter things out: if you do too much, it is kitsch and horrible; if you do nothing, you miss the mark. You have to get it right in the middle. And a conductor who has mastered operetta is equipped for just about anything. For example, he will no longer have any real problems with Puccini. ol And the last Strauss comment: he talked about the art of handling an orchestra. ct Without a doubt. Humperdinck uses a lot of characterization, in Wagnerian leitmotif style, if you will. He created astounding effects and wrote incredibly well for the orchestra. I think that Strauss simply admired the fact that someone could compose so beautifully and unerringly for the orchestra. Yes, I really think that he liked it! ol Did Strauss later make use of that, as a composer? ct Of course! As music director at a theatre – like Mahler, incidentally – he absorbed things voraciously from all the good composers. Naturally! He would have been stupid not to. Wagner knew Meyerbeer and borrowed from ol
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CHRISTIAN THIELEMANN IN AN INTERVIEW
him, and also from Schumann and Weber. Everyone did the same thing. ol You mentioned leitmotifs earlier: are these comparable to Wagner? For example, the Evening Prayer runs through the entire work. ct Everyone learned from Wagner in this regard, including Hum perdinck. The only difference is that Humperdinck did not use them with the same consistency as Wagner. The Evening Prayer is a very beautiful melody that Humperdinck wrote and was very pleased with; he thought it should be distributed throughout the opera. It’s clever; Wagner did something similar in Parsifal. Humperdinck was a child of his time. ol In the literature, we find that Humperdinck’s musical depictions of nature are often emphasized. Don’t we also find a strong influence from Wagner in this regard too? ct There is a section in Hänsel und Gretel, before the “cuckoo”, that is al most identical to the “Forest Murmurs”. I believe it is even the same harmony; the passages are almost identical. On the other hand, it is nevertheless quite different, and not copied. It is fascinating. ol Is there any aspect in which Humperdinck prevailed over Wagner? ct He did not prevail over him. But he incorporated folk song-like music, and that is something that Wagner did not do. Humperdinck made this opera more folksy. And this is precisely why the opera is so famous, one of the most famous works in world literature. ol Why did Humperdinck never manage to do this again, since
he had ideas and was so good at his craft? ct Think of Cavalleria and Pagliacci. One wonders why those two com posers never wrote anything comparable again. Sometimes one simply has a stroke of genius. I would be interested to know whether Humperdinck suspected that he would write such a masterpiece. ol To what extent is the opera appropriate for children? ct Appropriate... I find that most fairy tales include such extreme cruelty that they make you shudder. Just think: an old woman is shoved into an oven – and what she did before that! Bechstein and Hauff fairy tales are even worse... But as a child I didn’t find these stories so shocking, I just thought: that’s the way fairy tales are. In this case, we can give Humperdinck credit for toning down the cruelty. The witch in the opera may be cruel, but she is not a grotesque monster. ol What about the music? ct Musically, Hänsel und Gretel is of course not the simplest! But I for example was inducted in the Romantic orchestral sound by my parents when I was still a child. When the overture really gets going, I think to myself: my God, that’s what an orchestra should sound like! I have nothing against other orchestral sounds – but I had it imprinted on me in my youth. ol Hänsel und Gretel is – more or less – Humperdinck’s first music drama work. Is that evident in the opera? In the sense that he got going gradually and there are different layers in the opera? ct Not at all! It was just a stroke of genius. It is incomprehensible to me that someone who has no experience
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writing music theatre works can do something like this as it were off the cuff. That is real talent. ol To what extent was Humperdinck’s style perpetuated? ct To a certain extent in Richard Strauss. There is a line: Rheingold, Die Meistersinger, Siegfried Act 1, Humperdinck, and when you continue it you land in the end at Der Rosenkava lier and Die schweigsame Frau. Strauss too wrote wonderfully simple, innocent melodies, at the conclusion of Ein Heldenleben or the Alpensinfonie, and naturally in the final scene of Die schweigsame Frau. ol Is this simplicity particularly difficult? ct It is difficult because musicians who are enthusiastic tend to play more expansively. Precisely because it is so beautiful and so enjoyable, you don’t notice that the dynamic marking in the score is piano. This is where you have
to rein things in. You have a similar situation with Strauss. He also wrote the biggest behemoths, and in Die Frau ohne Schatten the conductor has to take care that the singers are not overtaxed right at the beginning. The best Strauss conductors were always those who stayed under the forte/fortissimo level. You have to know exactly when you can give more. Otherwise, things will end badly. ol Hänsel und Gretel has never been put on as a production at the House on the Ring since 1945. And many members of the orchestra have never played the opera. What is that like for you, as the conductor? ct Wonderful! Everyone is very taken with it and delighted that the opera is finally being performed. It is almost like something completely new here. It’s feels like walking through new snow... The interview took place in 2015.
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Following pages: SCENE
DIRECTOR ADRIAN NOBLE IN AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDREAS LÁNG
THROUGH A MAGIC DOOR INTO THE STORY al
When the first notes of the overture are heard and the curtain rises, what do we see: the beginning of a fairy tale? an When creating the staging, I always kept one critical factor in mind: for many children, Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel is the first opera they will ever have seen, and in some cases their first experience with real, live theatre – and this first impression will not necessarily but could influence their future relationship with this wonderful profession. Put differently, a performance of Hänsel und Gretel can be regarded as an invitation to a lifelong love of and involvement with theatre and music theatre. So I wanted to find a way of appealing to the children and introducing them to the story in an emotionally and evocatively wonderful way. When the curtain rises to the sounds of the overture, what you see first on the stage is a Victorian family in around 1890, cosily gathered in the living room: Mother, Father, Grandmother and four children. It is Christmas time, and gifts lie piled around a big Christmas tree. The Fa-
ther has prepared a very special surprise for the little ones: a laterna magica. With this magic lantern, you could project landscapes that were unknown at that time, scenes that were paradisal, colour ful and seemed wonderful. Finally, through these projections the door to the fairy tale of Hänsel und Gretel opens. al And the story then unfolds as usual? an The story then unfolds as usual, but I wanted to lead into it with something wonderful. In those days, the pictures from a magic lantern inspired exactly this feeling of wonder, of wonder in the face of a miracle. The individual sets for the production therefore all have a circular framing, as it were keeping the idea of the outline of the projection. al So there is also an oven in which the Witch is burned? an Yes, of course. There is an oven, a large cage in which Hänsel is locked up, and naturally there is the gingerbread house. However, our gingerbread house, which the children eat pieces of before the Witch shows up, is
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not one that you can enter. It is more like a very large cake in the shape of a gingerbread house – and this tempting giant cake is the bait in the trap that the Witch has set for the children. However, when the Witch first sings “nibble, nibble, little mouse”, initially all you see against a dark background is a huge eye, several metres high, the Witch’s eye. We played a bit with perspectives. al Is the Witch in this production a loathsome character or merely a dangerous old woman? an She becomes more and more loathsome from one second to the next. That must be the case. After all, what are we talking about here? She is a murderess, a killer, a serial killer, albeit one who wants to seem seductive, and it is not without reason that her music is seductive at times. But other than that, she should certainly instil fear. From a psychological standpoint, I find the music before the Witch’s ride taken together with the music for the Witch’s very exciting. Before the Witch mounts her broomstick, she throws wood on the fire. The fire grows hotter and bigger, and the Witch becomes more and more excited, until at the climax she snatches up her broom like a catharsis and rides it to and fro above the clouds. For her part, she had planned to murder a child from the outset. There is something of a ritual about it; for criminologists, this is an all too familiar process of getting into gear emotionally, getting a thrill, before committing a murder. Humper dinck captured it very uniquely and succinctly in the music. In general the score offers countless inspirational details for the director. On the one hand archetypes are used – such as
the drunken father – and on the other these archetypes, and also archetypical scenes, are described in great detail that we want to show to the audience. al At the beginning of the rehearsal process, during design discussions, you said that woods in England have a completely different symbolic importance from that in German-speaking countries. an Well, I believe that woods feature very prominently in German fairy tales and legends, especially dark, impenetrable and dangerous woods inhabited by all kinds of creatures and where you can get lost. It was not without reason that woods have such an important function in Richard Wagner and naturally here in Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. In my own country, in England, woods do not instil fear per se, they are also not so important. In English literature, gardens have a similar standing; in many of Shakespeare’s plays the garden is a symbol, a place, a metaphor. al To come back to your production: Why did you choose the Victorian era as the setting? an For me, the family seen in the overture could be relatives of the composer Humperdinck. I specifically selected the time as the era in which the opera was written. It has no effect at all on the actual storyline, but it clarifies some of the relationships. With this in mind, our view of the Mother is already different. She is not evil, she is not a bad mother, just because she shouts at her children and chases them into the woods. The libretto mentions hunger, especially in Act 1, real hunger such as we no longer know in the Western world today. The children have noth-
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ADRIAN NOBLE IN AN INTERVIEW
ing to eat, have had nothing for days, and their greatest delight is a jug of milk, and the fact that they spill the milk by accident is equivalent to a terrible catastrophe. Humperdinck knew what he was writing about, even if it had not touched him and his family, because in his day precisely this hardship was omnipresent throughout Europe. Just before I came to Vienna for rehearsals, I took my son to university and visited an old, disused lead mine not far away. Children worked in this mine in the 19th century; they worked all day, and they worked barefoot! We must view the Mother in this opera against the background of these terrible things; she despairs on account of poverty, of the hunger of her children and as a result she naturally loses her temper. Anyone who judges this mother does so sitting in a comfortable armchair in the 21st century, resting their hands on the chair arms. al Are there different messages for children and adults in this production? an No, not really. For one thing, I would like the adults to see the story a bit through children’s eyes and to hear the music with children’s ears. For another, when we watch children playing, it turns out that they often invent games that scare them. Why? Because by doing so they are unknowingly practising being adults and experiencing adult problems. All over the world there are countless variations of the game with the evil wolf who follows the child. In this game, the little ones can experience the feeling of terror, of fear, but ultimately they know they are safe. One might describe the feeling they are striving for as scarily exciting. And something similar hap-
pens when we listen to fairy tales and watch an opera like Hänsel und Gretel. We should not forget that many of the Grimms’ fairy tales are frightening, containing violence and creepy characters. In Hänsel und Gretel, children were killed and made into gingerbread, and even the two protagonists come within a whisker of being killed. In the end, they all come back to life, and this is very important, because it adheres to a very old and ultimately reassuring idea: the journey from life through death to resurrection or rebirth. For me, the dream, the pantomime of the 14 angels at the end of Act 2 of Hän sel und Gretel symbolizes the dream of death, which, in contrast to the Witch, holds no terror and shows that there is ultimately basic security. So to come back to your question: the message of life/death/renewed life applies equally to children and adults, albeit in different ways. al Did you apply any of the ideas of Sigmund Freud or Bruno Bettelheim to this production? an No, not directly. To be sure, Freud, Bettelheim and others help us to understand fairy tales, but we don’t have to spell that out insistently in the production, that would be too much of a good thing. Anyway, Freud is in the air we breathe – he was working here in Vienna at the time when Humperdinck was writing the music for Hänsel und Gretel. al Why does the Father know so much about the Witch and the Mother apparently so little? The Father seems to need to explain a lot. an There are two ideas here. Firstly, unlike her husband she does not spend time in various taverns, where the latest
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gossip, the newest mysterious incidents are discussed. Secondly, although she knows a few basic facts about the Witch and about the woods where she lives – she explicitly mentions Ilsenstein – in her anger she doesn’t think much, especially not about consequences, but says to the children something along the lines of: “Go to hell. I don’t care where you go, for all I care go to hell!” And the children go to hell. Of course, she didn’t really mean this and regrets it terribly, as we see later in her fear for her children. al Let’s talk about the protagonists. Hänsel und Gretel: what kind of children are they? an Humperdinck and his librettist watched children very closely and depicted them here. Gretel, a boisterous girl, is a little older than Hänsel and accordingly occasionally treats her brother a little maternally. Hänsel is cheeky and – as a boy – wants to appear to be brave, which in truth he is not. Like all siblings, they argue and fight with
each other, but as soon as a third party shows up, they stand together against the outside enemy. al You have children yourself. Is there something you have learned from them, something that you have been able to use in this production? an Absolutely. I have a similar constellation at home: a girl and a boy, the girl a little older. I am a lucky man. And naturally I have absorbed all the be haviour of the two of them and that of their friends. In the process, I have also seen a lot of politics... al What will happen when the story of Hänsel und Gretel comes to an end? an When you go through all these experiences and dangers, you are not the same as you were before, are you? The children have become a little older, a little wiser, and I believe that perhaps their parents too have changed. Everyone gets a second chance – and that is a wonderful thing. The interview took place in 2015.
Following pages:
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KS ADRIAN ERÖD as PETER BESENBINDER JANINA BAECHLE as GERTRUD
STAGE DESIGNER AND COSTUME DESIGNER A N T HON Y WA R D I N A N I N T E RV I E W WITH ANDREAS LÁNG
A MAGICAL WORLD al
When you’re creating stage settings or costumes, do you listen to the music to get inspired? Or do you read the libretto? Or how do you begin? aw Definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, it all comes from the music. And, you know I’ve been listening to this music thousands and thousands of times, and it’s completely the heart and soul of all of this. Obviously, I couldn’t even begin to start without it. The heart of the thing is the music. So, yes, I absolutely do listen to it. al Then how do you use it? You hear the music, and then? aw Well the libretto is obviously important in terms of actually understanding the story. To be honest with you, I knew the piece before. Many, many years ago I got to know it, and so I had a familiarity with it. But I have to say I’d forgotten a lot about it. You start playing the music in the background, while you’re working on other projects, perhaps. And then obviously you’re drawn into it bit by bit. And then, of course, you have your design deadlines, you have to come up with a concept by a certain time. So you start meeting with the director, and throwing ideas about to form an overall vision. I suppose it’s helpful in terms of the fact that we have to come up with a concept, and then you come and deliver a white card model followed by a fi-
nal model. So there’s obviously all this pressure in that time to really think the thing through in a very broad way. So that really focuses one. al Did you have a fundamental idea in the beginning, or did you have different ideas? aw I would have said that I didn’t have any of the ideas in the beginning. And I was quite dogged by famous productions over the last few years, which I know about. And I think the whole thing about it is very psychological, with quite a lot of subtext and Freud, and all that sort of stuff going on in there. But I think Adrian felt we should be much purer and more direct about it, and more childlike about it. So that immediately means that I’m going to have to find some sort of style that’s is going to fill that childlike illustrative sort of way of telling the story. al And so the director proposes an idea and you picture it? aw No, we very much work together, but I would’ve said that, yes, it’s not so much that he’s got an idea as opposed to we’re both trying to find a way of telling the story visually, and not just visually, but bringing meaning to the story. And I would have said the spirit of it is most definitely led by Adrian. Because he’s very open, he would not come in and say “Oh, it’s got to be like this.” Or “I’ve got this idea for it and I’m
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going to do that.” He works much more organically than that. al Do you develop things emotionally, or in a strictly logical manner? aw That’s a really difficult question to answer, because I would have said yes, it would be emotionally. But I think it’s possibly done more logically. Just because, for example, the pantomime, and we call it the dream sequence or the dream. The music is absolutely sublime, and therefore one responds intensely emotionally to this, as to what you want to see on the stage. On the other hand, you have logistics and you have to be practical about how things are going to get from A to B, and where they’re set in the space. It’s always a tussle between the two. I can’t say I would respond emotionally to all the music, to solve the design. For example, in the first scene with the children in the house, I’ve got to create an environment, that is part of the bigger story. Whereas in the dream, one’s response is “Oh my god, we have to deliver something wonderful for that amazing music!” al Do you start with a design and then the set, and then the costumes? aw Yes, I would always start with the set, even though sometimes I think I really would love to design the costumes. But the set always gives you the world, and then you dress the people within that. al Was the Victorian room an idea that you developed from the beginning? aw The overture draws us into the story. And we also felt that you want the audience – both children and adults – to be lead into the tale. To be
honest with you, I can’t quite remember how the whole family thing came up. Adrian was very taken by a scene in Fanny and Alexander where they have a magic lantern and a ghost. That very much inspired us to go into the magic lantern story and that’s a marvellous way of beginning to tell a story. So that the children are delighted by the father with the magic lantern, and they’re left alone with it, and then it starts to misbehave and then suddenly they’re in a world that’s very Narnia-like. And then those children are taken into the story of Hänsel und Gretel. al During the course of Hänsel und Gretel, were there changes in the costume concepts or the set concept, or was it one concept from beginning to end? aw Yes, definitely! The concept model I came here with was a very rough idea. Now, it’s very different in terms of the fact that I had great big trees that we were moving on and off, and it was all on a rake. When I presented this first model I needed everybody to get on with the idea. So it wasn’t a practical idea, but I suppose it was more of an emotional response to the story, as you were saying earlier. Therefore it has changed quite a lot in the detail, as it’s developed. al When you develop a set, do you also think about the lighting? aw We put LED lighting in the model – this was really great for lighting the model and taking photographs. But this doesn’t mean to say that I think “Oh Jean, I really think you should light this scene like this!” because firstly, I’m not a lighting designer and secondly, it just amazes me that when we’re on stage on the first day, of stage rehearsal, and everything just
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A MAGICAL WORLD
looks dead. We’re all sitting on chairs in front of it, and everybody’s saying “It looks really nice!” and you’re thinking it just looks horrible! And then, bit by bit, more set comes, and lighting comes, and everything starts getting into the right place. It’s a real rough magic, the theatre, and that’s what makes it work. al When you create a stage design, do you try to say anything to the audience with it? Should the audience feel anything when they see your set design? aw Yes, I definitely think they should. You’re trying to create a magical world, you feel that people can get drawn into it, and be inspired by it. I’ve been to the theatre, when wonder-
ful worlds are created and wonderful stories are told, it really makes a fantastic connection. And that’s why we do what we do, though that doesn’t always happen, but that’s what we’re all striving to do. Obviously the set is only a part of the story, so I don’t think they should just say “Oh my god” when they see the set. al And finally, do you sometimes find yourself working on different productions at the same time? aw Yes, and they may be at different stages of the design process. While we’re in production here, we’ll be starting something else. So projects overlap. The interview took place in 2015.
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MICHAELA SCHUSTER as WITCH
WA LT E R D OB N E R
“A FIRSTRATE MASTER PIECE” THE COMPOSITION OF HÄNSEL UND GRETEL “We would like to perform your fairy story, Hänsel und Gretel, as a Christmas gift,” the general manager of the Court Theatre in Weimar, Hans von Bronsart, wrote to composer Engelbert Humperdinck on 12 November 1892. Just a few days later, Humperdinck discussed details of the production with Eduard Lassen, court music director, and two singers, including Pauline de Ahna, who later married Richard Strauss. In the end, it was Richard Strauss who gave the première of Humperdinck’s opera on 23 December 1893 in Weimar. That was just two months after he first had the opportunity of reviewing the new score. The story of Humperdinck’s fairytale opera in three acts began in 1888 or 1890, depending on your perspective. As we read in her autobiography, Humperdinck’s sister Adelheid Wette, who was married to a doctor in Frankfurt, devised various plays – some
serious, some funny – to entertain her children; she wrote short fairy-tale plays in rhyme, to which the children’s accommodating Uncle Engelbert was happy to write melodies. The first of these pieces was the fairy-tale play Snow White, for which Humperdinck wrote several songs in December 1888. The initial ideas for a piece on Hänsel und Gretel were developed two years later. In Adelheid Wette’s little pocket diary, next to a number of recipes is the note: “Hänsel und Gretel. First draft”, with several verses. Her ideas take more concrete shape in a letter to her brother written in April 1890. In it, she outlines the subject fairly clearly: “Hänsel and Gretel are at home alone, they are hungry and working (mending baskets), and since Gretel is grumpy, Hänsel suggests they sing and dance to amuse themselves. Gretel agrees, and while they are cavorting around (on the last gleeful la la la), the
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“A F I R S T- R A T E M A S T E R P I E C E ”
Mother enters, scolds them and shoos them out of the house, etc. – You can read the rest for yourself when I send it to you.” In closing, she offers some advice on the music: “Now be kind, dear brother, and write something pretty and folksy for me; this is my best little work, and so it is also my favourite child.” The occasion for which the work was written was the 34th birthday of Adelheid’s husband Hermann. She wanted to surprise him with a fairytale play in which their two oldest children, eight-year-old Isolde and sevenyear-old Gudrun, were to play the lead roles. The day after he received the letter, Humperdinck started setting his sister’s texts to music. In the end, there were four pieces for one or two children’s voices that he sent to Adelheid with the note, “it is almost by ‘return mail’ that I am sending you the music you requested. I hope that it will please you as much as your verses pleased me.” They were a “Dance Duet” (later “Brother, come and dance with me”), “Echo Song”, “Lullaby” and “Cocka- doodle-doo”. On 20 May 1890 the Liederspiel Hänsel und Gretel was heard for the first time at the Wette family home in Cologne. Humperdinck was not present. He sent birthday wishes to his brother-in-law by telegraph.
“A FIRST-RATE BOX OFFICE HIT” The subject had appealed to him for some time. He not only discussed it with his parents and with Adelheid a short while later, but also talked about it with Cosima Wagner and her children, Siegfried and Daniela. During an excursion to Kronberg im Taunus
in early May 1890, Cosima related that she had recently attended a performance of the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, a subject that had not previously found its way into music. More emphatic than this hint from Cosima Wagner was the insistence of Humper dinck’s brother-in-law, Hermann Wette, that Humperdinck expand on this more or less informal Liederspiel. In June 1890 he was already urging Humperdinck to start work on it immediately, that autumn, “so that the work can perhaps be performed this winter; it will surely be a first-rate box office hit, otherwise I would not do it,” as he expressed his high expectations. Humperdinck took this to heart, and his sister and brother-in-law sent him new texts. Humperdinck’s father, Gustav Ferdinand Humperdinck, latterly director of the teachers’ training college in Xanten, also contributed a scene for the work; it is almost identical to a scene in the final version of the opera, namely the third scene in Act 1. Was Humperdinck’s effort worth it? After presenting the finished sections of the singspiel to an audience of invited guests at the Wette household in September 1890, he made the following disappointed note in his diary: “Ran through Hänsel und Gretel at the Wettes, approx. one hour. Mood of boredom.” The composer did not consider giving up the project; he had just started working as an opera critic for the renowned Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper and as a teacher at the Hoch Conservatory. Quite the contrary. He told Dr. Ludwig Strecker, head of the prestigious Schott publishing house, about the project, and met with his enthusiastic approval. Strecker wanted to
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WA LT E R D OB N E R
“duplicate the text”, Humperdinck delightedly told his sister and brother-inlaw of this conversation. Increasingly, his brother-in-law had become his closest collaborator on this project – so much so, in fact, that Adelheid was only peripherally involved in its progress. This sheds a different light on the view that Humperdinck owed the idea for the opera of Hänsel und Gretel to his sister Adelheid. It was also Hermann Wette who helped Humperdinck out of a bout of depression in November 1890 and expressly urged him not to underestimate his artistic talent. Prior to that Humperdinck had complained to his fiancée Hedwig Taxer: “I just can’t make any progress with Hänsel und Gretel. It seems to me that the air here is not conducive to it.” The reason for his mood was that the libretto was not yet complete, as well as the fact that he was not allowed, as expected, to teach composition at the conservatory. In any case, he quickly emerged from this low; for their engagement on Christmas day 1890 the composer presented his Hedwig with the gift of the short score for the singspiel Hänsel und Gretel .
“A LITTLE ONE-ACT WORK” In the meantime, Humperdinck was convinced that he had a great opera in Hänsel und Gretel. On 16 January 1891 he wrote to Hermann Levi, court music director in Munich: “The ‚little oneact work’ will soon be finished and will hopefully be seen on many stages. You think that your large theatre would not be suitable for it? Well, since it is about fairy-tale magic, there are several new developments and suchlike with a large
orchestra (naturally not a Nibelungen orchestra!) which in my opinion would be entirely appropriate for a large house. However, until it is finished I am reluctant to talk about it. I would be delighted if at some point you wanted to get to know the piece”, Humperdinck wrote, exercising diplomacy with wise foresight. Successfully, as the performance history of Hänsel und Gretel reveals. On 30 December 1893, seven days after the première in Weimar, Mottl conducted the first Munich performance of this international success. But the piece was not yet finalized. In January 1891, Humperdinck was working on the orchestration of the singspiel. He settled down to work, but immediately started having doubts as to whether he should flesh out the “patchwork”, as he called it, or perhaps resist the temptation to “make the entire piece through-composed”, as he informed his brother-in-law on 18 January 1891 and his fiancée on 22 January 1891. A little later, Humperdinck sent Hermann Wette the through-composed children’s scene. Wette replied by return mail: “Dear Engelbert! My advice on Hänsel und Gretel is this: make the entire piece through-composed!” Humperdinck and Wette worked closely together, as their correspondence reveals, to produce the final version of the opera. Adelheid too offered suggestions and sent copies of texts, addressing her brother in a letter as “Dear Hänsel”. The opera project found little favour with Cosima Wagner – at least initially. Humperdinck’s version of the Witch’s Waltz for piano duet, prepared especially for the Wagners, remained unperformed. The libretto for the opera went missing but turned up
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“A F I R S T- R A T E M A S T E R P I E C E ”
at Lake Lucerne. Cosima then reacted promptly, praising the libretto as “poetically very appealing” in a letter to her dear friend Humperdinck. She was convinced that “it has given you the opportunity to write the most charming music”. Ideas for changes to the staging arrived too late, as the composition had long since burgeoned into the third act. Suddenly Humperdinck had difficulties with “a few transition passages that never come out as I would like them to. When I come up with something that pleases me, it doesn’t fit the other section, and when I try to adapt that, the result is a complete mess.” He could not start with the orchestration until he had solved this problem. The success of Pietro Mascagni’s new opera L’amico Fritz also worried him. Could it turn into competition for Hänsel und Gretel, even though the Mascagni opera was only a one-act work and not a full-length opera? He did not have much time to reflect on this as he wanted to have his opera finished before his wedding. In December, he completed the work with the composition of the overture. Even before he wrote it down, he informed a friend, the music critic Oskar Mertz, that he would model it on Wagner’s overture to Die Meistersinger. The moment he had set it down on paper, he presented it to Hermann Wette, calling it “a fairly extensive piece of music”, “a kind of symphonic prologue that one might give the title ‘childhood life’. It starts with the guardian angels’ chorus, played by the horns, then transitions to ‘Hocus pocus’, which gives way to the melody ‘The angels told us in a dream’, and concludes playfully with ‘The Witch’s spell is broken’ in a cheery E major. The
chorus is then heard again, organically combined with the melody ‘The angels told us etc.’ and concluding with the triumphant ‘Hocus pocus, the Witch’s spell is broken’ in a splendid C major.” At Christmas 1891, a year after he had given the short score of the singspiel to his fiancée, he could now surprise her with the score of the opera.
“IT WENT RELATIVELY WELL” The year 1892 began fatefully for Humperdinck: he noted a loss of hearing in his right ear that persisted for the rest of his life. Initially this impeded his work on orchestration of the opera, which was finally progressing well, interrupted only by the wedding on 19 May. He even devoted time to the score during his subsequent trip to Bayreuth, where the newlyweds attended rehearsals and performances of Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde and Tannhäuser, which Humperdinck reported on in the Frankfurter Zeitung. The clean copy was not even finished when he sent the libretto of his new opera to Fritz Brandt, chief director at the theatre in Weimar. “It pleases me in every regard, and I shall recommend it warmly to our general manager, Mr. Bronsart von Schellendorf, who has the final decision on the performance of new works” was his happy verdict on this novelty. The letter was dated 20 August. Two months later – transcribing the score would keep the composer occupied until 17 September 1893 – Humperdinck received Bronsart’s approval for the performance of Hänsel und Gretel as a “Christmas gift”. “After a rather poor dress rehearsal, yesterday’s first performance of Hänsel
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“A F I R S T- R A T E M A S T E R P I E C E ”
und Gretel went relatively well and was generally well received” Richard Strauss reported of the première to the composer, who was not present. On 11 January 1894, the first royalty payments arrived: 27 marks and 2 pfennigs, as Humperdinck told his brother-in-law Hermann Wette in a letter. In the same letter, he expressed concern about whether the income from the opera would cover the expense of
the journey. An unnecessary concern, as it soon turned out, because within the first year Hänsel und Gretel was already being performed on almost fifty German stages. At the latest since the first performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1905, Engelbert Humperdinck’s masterpiece has been considered one of opera’s great international success stories.
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KS ADRIAN ERÖD as PETER BESENBINDER
PAU LUS HOCHGAT T ER ER
SPEAKING OF GINGERBREAD Fairy tales have a lot to offer. Like lone trees, they seem always to have been there and at the same time look at the world just as five-year-old children do. The experience inevitably made by those who try to interpret or explain fairy tales is one of error and insufficiency. The purely mythological approach is relativized by social-history arguments, the purely pedagogic perspective is refuted by the literary view, and the psychoanalyst who has just enthusiastically dedicated himself to the sexual metaphorical signifi cance of fairy-tale frogs is guaranteed to run into a zoologist who tells him how things were with the real amphibians in the 16th century on the Lower Rhine. In brief: fairy tales are always mightier than their exegesis. That is a little irritating for the exegetes, but of course fine for everyone else. It is impossible simply to set aside stories that defy valid interpretation. Stories that contain riddles or even illustrate a riddle are generally far less prone to disappearing in archives or libraries than other stories. With their contrariness, their ambiguity, their switching between bourgeois moral rectitude, garish cruelty and phantasmatic magic,
fairy tales are above all enigmas. That is why they are still told. One of the most frequent errors made in respect of fairy tales is assuming that children will inevitably like them. (Whether children need fairy tales is another question. In his wonderful little book Witches’ Whispers Michael Maar countered the well-known postulate used as a book title by psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim Children Need Fairy Tales with the question: Do children need Bettelheim? I think not.) Most children prefer comics to fairy tales, they like Instragam and WhatsApp or Harry Potter. They say as much too. On the other hand, if you ask adults, they tend to claim that of course they liked fairy tales when they were children; they are generally even able to name their favourite fairy tale from those days. I think that the shift in things in retrospect also has something to do with the enigmatic basic structure of fairy tales. Stories that contain riddles or illustrate riddles are not only told through the centuries, they endure as unfinished universals, as tiny specks of light in us, regardless of whether we liked them as children or not. Fairy tales engage us, even if
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SPEAKING OF GINGERBREAD
we did not engage with them from early on. If you ask people what their favourite fairy tale was, incidentally, the story most frequently mentioned is Hänsel und Gretel. And that bring us to our actual topic. When we examine Engelbert Hum perdinck’s version of the Hänsel und Gretel story or above all the libretto written by his sister Adelheid Wette and her husband Hermann, knowing the version by the Brothers Grimm from their Children’s and Household Tales, we find ourselves facing not a riddle of the above-mentioned proportions, but nevertheless a few questions. What did the father do to earn being dispossessed of his entirely honourable profession of woodcutter and being made into a broom maker? Does it have something to do with the greater probability of a cyclical boost in income in this industry or rather with the authors’ intention to illustrate the character’s unconscious ambivalence towards witches? Or has the husband been retrained as a result of a far less subtle sexual metaphorical consideration? What after all is the broom maker’s broom good for? “A broom, a broom – what does one do with it? Witches ride on them!” Why are hunger and deprivation left as dynamic fundamental elements of the story, but then significantly relativized by the milk jug, which stands there and inspires the idea of rice pudding – and a little later completely marginalized by bacon, butter, sausage and coffee that the father brings home in his rucksack? “Hunger is the best cook.” Well, perhaps it is. When Peter, Hänsel and Gretel’s father, sings that, the cook clearly has greater
metaphorical importance than hunger. In the woods, a short time later the children eat all the strawberries from the basket that they had just filled to the brim. There is no question of anything but dry bread as we find in the Grimms’ version. And where do the magical characters suddenly appear from: the Sandman and the Dew Fairy? They did not exist in the fairy tale. There were also no angels in it, not two, not three and certainly not fourteen. In the fairy tale, Hänsel and Gretel were guided to the Witch’s house by a representative of the species of winged creatures; however, it was clearly a bird and not a transcendent resident of heaven. The libretto of the opera conspicuously does away with the two excursions the children make into the woods that is so familiar to us all: the episodes with the pebbles and the breadcrumbs that promise excitement as the spiral closes. Instead of this, the little brother and little sister must dance, although it makes little sense dramatically and the boy opposes the idea: “I don’t dance with little girls, it’s too silly for me.” Why this insertion? Just for the sake of including a wellknown folk song? Why is the opera Witch given spells that the Witch in the Grimm Brothers’ story did not use, and why does the Witch’s house ultimately turn completely into a gingerbread bakery in which a mass resurrection is effected to the sounds of redemption? Fairy tales have a lot to offer. We are back where we started. Fairy tales survive not just because they contain riddles, but above all because they convey things that are difficult to bear, hardly pronounceable, thousandfold
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PAU LUS HOCHGAT T ER ER
hidden and put under a taboo, sometimes convoluted and symbolically reshaped, but in many cases straightforward and blunt. A decisive aspect of the story of the siblings Hänsel and Gretel in the Grimm Brothers’ version Children’s and Household Tales seems to be difficult to bear for the siblings Adelheid Wette and Engelbert Humperdinck as well. The psychopathic cruelty of the fairy-tale Mother, who is always willing to sacrifice the lives of her children for the sake of her own needs is changed to a mental state that is not completely free of aggression, but essentially corresponds to depressive exhaustion. At least that is how we would see it today. “I am tired, tired to death.” A mother who as a result of the ongoing struggle for daily existence, due to the undependable nature of her husband and perhaps also because of his affinity for caraway schnapps, is finally so tired that she wants to die is much easier to tolerate – for the consumer and for the librettist – than a mother who cannot send her children off to die quickly enough. On the one hand we understand it, and would not even need to consider by way of substantiation that between the first publication of the Grimms’ fairy tale collection and the first performance of Humperdinck’s opera lay German Romantic period with its tendency to idealize mothers. On the other hand, we must realize that the change in the personality profile of the Mother from child murderer to simply a despairing woman decisively transforms the entire story. Above all the function of the Witch changes dramatically. She has become meaningless as a projection of the chil-
dren’s fantasies of terror and revenge. In the absence of an evil Mother, although the opera Witch is in search of fat children that she can eat, she is even more in search of a plausible psychological justification for her existence. The closest she comes to it is through Peter, the Father, at the end of Act 1. When his wife tells him that in her anger about the broken milk jug she sent her children to collect berries in the woods, near Ilsenstein, he is seized by horror: “Don’t you know that the evil woman lives there?” On stage he not only gives a vivid description of the Witch, along with her gingerbread house and gingerbread children, but in fact anticipates the rest of the story. The part of the narrative about the Witch which shifts to a magical level due to the realism of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale seems in the opera to be mainly a fear-incited vision on the part of the Father. This interpretation is not entirely incorrect, as we see in the final scene of the story, when the Father is confronted by the Witch. Like the outcome of successful behaviour therapy for anxiety disorder, she turns out to be made of nothing but gingerbread! And speaking of just gingerbread: A story that does away with child murder by abolishing the evil mother lets real death alone. The burning of the Witch in the sense of the above mentioned switch from realism to a magical level is replaced by a gingerbread metamorphosis. That is not only gentler for the psyche of the viewer, but is coherent in that for the two children the psychological need for identification with the aggressor, in other words the Mother, is eliminated. In this way Hänsel and Gretel are spared having to commit homicide and the potential
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SPEAKING OF GINGERBREAD
lifelong sense of guilt. We do not begrudge them that. However, there is one thing that we may consider a bit of a shame. Since Gertrud, the opera Mother, has neither a willingness to accept the death of her children nor the underlying narcissistic greed, Hänsel and Gretel have no identification-induced motive to plunder the belongings left by the Witch. So there are no pearls and precious stones, as there are in the fairy tale.
Perhaps the Father will soon make another good business deal. What one is more inclined to understand is the omission from the opera of the white duck that carries the two children home across a large pond at the end of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale. From 1880, Engelbert Humperdinck was personal assistant to Richard Wagner, and as such was probably already familiar with Lohengrin!
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ANDREAS LÁNG
HÄNSEL UND GRETEL AT THE WIENER STAATSOPER Immediately after the successful German world première of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel conducted by Richard Strauss, the opera triumphed in city after city and arrived in the Danube metropolis, to be precise at the Vienna Court Opera, within a year. Wilhelm Jahn conducted the festive première on 18 December 1894 himself, so the work had the air of being the principal conductor’s domain from the outset in Austria too. He engaged the cream of the crop for the cast. Marie Renard, the celebrated Charlotte from the première of Werther, sang Hänsel, and Paula Mark, whom Mahler’s biographer Richard Specht referred to as possessing “the most intense and true talent” of the ensemble, sang Gretel. The smaller roles were also cast with top-class singers: the two distinguished coloratura sopranos Irene Abendroth and Marie Lehmann played the Sandman and the Witch respectively, and ensemble singers of outstanding merit, Josef Ritter and Luise Kaulich, were the broom-maker couple. Eduard Hanslick accordingly did not miss the opportunity of discussing the work and the première at length in a six-column article in the
Neue Freie Presse (starting on the front page of the newspaper). He was unusually euphoric, at least as far as the performance itself was concerned. His review began: “The siblings Hänsel und Gretel enjoyed a complete triumph in Vienna yesterday, as they had done earlier in Germany’s most prestigious cities of music” and ended: “Miss Renard and Miss Mark above all are worthy of mention. In their difficult roles they once again proved that they are firstclass talent. No praise is too great for the verve with which they approached their task, and for the charming details with which they embellished it. Who was better, Renard or Mark? Both of them, I would say. Miss Lehmann as the Witch was also equal to them … giving a superb performance ... Add the virtuoso Court Opera Orchestra and the splendid décor of Anton Brioschi – what more would one need for a complete success?” (The opera itself appealed less to Hanslick, which is hardly surprising, given that the composer had studied under Wagner, as Humperdinck had.) Just how attached Humperdinck was to “his child” as a whole and the extent to which the
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HÄNSEL UND GRETEL AT THE WIENER STAATSOPER
composer regarded the music and the production as a cohesive unit is evident from a letter he wrote to Wilhelm Jahn before the première in Vienna, giving a few notes on the set. For example, he did not want the set for the dream pantomime be too ostentatious, but rather dreamily poetic. In his biography of his father, Wolfram Humperdinck describes the great success of the Viennese première at some length, mentioning another important composer colleague who was evidently taken with the opera: “Johannes Brahms too was one of the audience members on whom the work made a strong impression. The next morning he went to visit Humperdinck at the Hotel Sacher. Since he did not find him there, he left his card with a few words of warm thanks. When Humperdinck returned the visit, Brahms professed the great joy the opera had given him.” As different as Gustav Mahler and Felix von Weingartner – Wilhelm Jahn’s two successors as conductor – were, they were of the same opinion in their appreciation of Hänsel und Gretel. The piece was scheduled accordingly frequently, year in, year out, until the year 1910: no less than 144 times. After a break of twelve years, under the direction of Richard Strauss, another major champion of the work, the success story of the work in Vienna was continued. Starting in 1922, Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera was seen in the new production by Woldemar Runge with sets by Robert Kautsky – and naturally Strauss was on the podium for the première and several subsequent performances. As previously mentioned: the domain of principal conductors. In contrast to his prede-
cessor Hanslick, although Julius Korn gold praised the work in his review, as an opponent of Strauss’s administration he made one or two stinging remarks about the performance. “Miss Schumann and Miss Anday [as Hänsel and Gretel] did not seem to need the wicked Witch to feed them…” was one offhand remark, or “Both Hänsel and Gretel performed their roles quite well, provided one did not heedlessly reflect on outstanding performances from the past.” Nevertheless, he praised Marie Gutheil-Schoder’s Witch (“The artist sings and acts with and without her broom with virtuosity and humour”) and let the rest of the cast be. The praise he heaped on the conducting – if such it was – virtually overflowed with nuances (“In the orchestra pit, Richard Strauss practised his preference for the graceful, the naive, the Mozartian…”). What was most important, however, was that audiences were generally very taken with the work, the production and the singers, resulting in a 22-year run for the production. (Between 1930 and 1933, the former Witch Marie Gutheil-Schoder was responsible for direction, in other words essentially for changes, adaptations and staging decisions.) Many in the audience (and the administration) would have considered it unthinkable that the 69th performance of this production on 30 March 1944 would be the last performance of Hänsel und Gretel at the opera house on the Ring for more than 70 years. In any case, in 1945 Hänsel und Gretel was scheduled to be put on again at the temporary quarters at the Volksoper, where the popular fairy-tale opera was performed regularly until 1954. But then a paradigm shift took place. In Austria, Hänsel und Gretel
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HÄNSEL UND GRETEL AT THE WIENER STAATSOPER
suddenly became viewed as no more than a children’s opera, and so was initially unable to achieve the move back to the Wiener Staatsoper. Anyone in Vienna who wanted to see a good to outstanding performance of Hän
sel und Gretel could for many years do so primarily at the Vienna Volksoper. This gap in the repertoire at Vienna’s top opera house was finally closed with the première of the current production on 19 November 2015.
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MARGARET PLUMMER as HÄNSEL CHEN REISS as GRETEL
CHRISTA LUDWIG
HOCUS POCUS In the truly grim fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the witch is evil, old, and ugly, with a wart on her nose, a humpback; she has a black cat, and a black bird on her shoulder. But… could it not be different? For example: Once upon a time there was a young woman whose desire to have children remained unfulfilled. Frustrated, she created a forest, her “ideal world”, where she lived in a small house made of sweet gingerbread, killed children and baked them. And so she was surrounded by children, albeit made of gingerbread, but nevertheless the children she had so ardently longed for. Possible? Why not? But in reality “witches” are often beautiful and young, otherwise how could they bewitch young men? And for example when we don’t want to admit our own shortcomings and cannot get something or other done, we like to say: it must be bewitched. After all, someone else must be to blame! In general, people like to believe that there is more between heaven and earth than the things we can realistically grasp. We like to explore the boundary between reality and the esoteric, and it is ghosts, demons, witches, and elves who populate this “boundary”. Not only in the Middle Ages, but today too, occult forces live on in shamanism. And in our modern and oh-so-enlightened world, we love to ponder anomalies such as the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs, and we cherish books and films about Harry Potter. Art too has availed itself of the spirit world, for example Goya in painting, Goethe through Mephistopheles, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the Witch’s Multiplication Table, which so far no one has really been able to explain. And are our idols and political demagogues not also magicians? Incidentally, it is not that long ago that the last “witch” was burned: in 1807! We should
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HOCUS POCUS
beware of believing in such things just because we want to experience something surreal. As soon as you get anywhere near superstition, it vanishes into thin air and turns out to have been just a spook! In Hänsel und Gretel the Witch is burned in the oven by the two children; the victims became the perpetrators. But in our lives today such things happen only in fairy tales, don’t they? In any case, I regret that I never sang the Witch on the stage, but “only” on recordings: I would have loved to fly through the air on a broomstick...
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Following pages: SCENE
IMPRINT ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK
HÄNSEL UND GRETEL SEASON 2023/24 PREMIÈRE OF THE PRODUCTION 19.11.2015 Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ Music Director PHILIPPE JORDAN Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV General Editors SERGIO MORABITO, ANDREAS LÁNG, OLIVER LÁNG Design & concept EXEX Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER Image concept: MARTIN CONRADS, BERLIN (Cover) All performance photos MICHAEL PÖHN Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU TEXT REFERENCES All texts were taken from the première programme of the Vienna State Opera 2015. All articles - except of the text by Humperdinck - were for this programme. IMAGES: Cover image: © Aleksandr Zubkov / GettyImages. ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS Andrew Smith. Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Abbreviations are not marked. Holders of rights who were unavailable regarding retrospect compensation are requested to make contact.
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OUR ENERGY FOR YOUR PASSION. The Vienna State opera is one of the most important opera houses in the world. As an Austrian and internationally active company, we are proud to be the general sponsor and to support this unique cultural venue with all our energy since 2014. You can find more information about the OMV sponsorship projects at omv.com/sponsoring
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