It’s a little scary . . . well, actually it’s a lot scary. It’s a Brothers Grimm fairy tale—it’s supposed to be scary! 

But this completely new look at the beloved tale is also a whole lot of fun with a witch you’ll remember for a long, long while. Part maniac, part Julia Child, she wields a mean mixer, tossing in a dash of just about everything, including the kids!

A touching tribute to the wisdom and strength of children, along with some of the most gorgeous music ever written.

Sung in English with English text projected above the stage.

Performances held at the Keller Auditorium.

Cast

Act I

In Hansel and Gretel’s house. Hansel complains he is hungry. Gretel shows him some milk that a neighbor has given for the family’s supper. The children dance. Their mother returns and wants to know why they have gotten so little work done. She accidentally spills the milk and chases the children out into the woods to pick strawberries.
Their father, a broom-maker, returns home drunk. He brings out the food he has bought, then asks where the children have gone. The mother tells him that she has sent them into the woods. He tells her about the Witch who lives there and says that the children are in danger. They go out into the woods to look for them.

Act II

Hansel picks strawberries. The children hear a cuckoo singing and eat the strawberries. Soon they have eaten every one. In the sudden silence of the wood, Hansel admits to Gretel that he has lost the way. The children grow frightened. The Sandman comes to bring them sleep, sprinkling sand over their eyes. The children say their evening prayer. In a dream, they see 14 angels.

Act III 

The Dew Fairy comes to waken the children. Gretel wakes Hansel, and they see the gingerbread house. They end up in the Witch’s kitchen. The Witch decides to fatten Hansel up and casts a spell on him. The oven is hot. Gretel breaks the Witch’s spell and sets Hansel free. When the Witch asks her to look in the oven, she pretends she doesn’t know how to: the Witch must show her. When the Witch peers into the oven, the children shove her inside and shut the door. The oven explodes. The gingerbread children come back to life. The mother and father find the children, and all express gratitude for their salvation.

—Courtesy Welsh National Opera

“Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

—G. K. Chesterton

In 1890, Adelheid Wette approached her older brother, a composer, to set some trifling songs she had written for a little play she intended for her daughters to perform as family entertainment.  Her gracious brother obliged and wrote the tune, “Brother come and dance with me, both my hands I offer thee:” a tune so fresh, so original and yet so familiar that his family, utterly charmed and delighted, urged him to write more.  Soon Engelbert Humperdinck and his sister Adelheid were collaborating (much as their protagonists Hansel and Gretel) on a Singspiel, which eventually evolved into a full-blown opera.  Its popularity in Germany was extraordinary, and it made its way to England within a few short years, and to the United States shortly after that. Hansel and Gretel became the first opera broadcast in its entirety over radio (in 1923, from Covent Garden), and then became the first ever live Metropolitan Opera Broadcast in 1931.  The opera filled a great need for those who loved the chromatic orchestrations of Wagner, but had overdosed on his conceits.  For them, Humperdinck, with his lush symphonic language and unaffected melodies, was the perfect antidote.

During the Victorian Era in which Humperdinck found himself writing, a number of things were happening.  Nationalism continued its rise throughout Europe, with a particular interest in the development of idioms that were “authentic” to the mother country, whatever that happened to be.  With this interest also came the recognition and idealization of childhood as a distinct period in human development, a rather new phenomena in the history of humanity.   Taken together, increased interest in folklore and fairy tales makes sense, as does the bowdlerization of those fairy tales for the nursery.

Although the terms “folk tales” and “fairy tales” are often used interchangeably, there is actually a difference between them.  Folk tales emerge from an oral tradition, with authors who are often unknown, lost to time.  Fairy tales have a literary tradition and belong to a singular author.  Sometimes, despite their best intentions, collectors of folk tales end up creating fairy tales, as did 18th century French author Charles Perrault.  During the early 19th century, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began collecting German folk tales by inviting storytellers into their home and carefully recording what they were told.  In 1810, they published their collection of stories in Children’s and Household Tales, which included “Hansel and Gretel,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Snow White,” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” all of which are familiar to us today, although not perhaps in their original versions!  The Grimm stories were, well, rather grim.  Bloody justice was meted out, unmitigated by Christian kindness.  They weren’t necessarily really for children after all.  Later versions of these tales, still published by the Grimm brothers, prettied up some of the more gristly details.  And by the time Humperdinck’s little sister Adelheid was looking about for a story to adapt for her children to perform, the unvarnished Grimm version of “Hansel and Gretel” was already deemed inappropriate for children.  At least for the romanticized innocence of the Victorian child.   

Fortunately for Adelheid, she didn’t have to start from scratch modifying the unremittingly dark tale herself.  In their own childhoods, Adelheid and Engelbert had not read Grimm’s version of Hansel and Gretel, but Ludwig Bechstein’s version from a collection of bowdlerized Grimm fairy tales, which Disney-fied the tales long before Disney.  Bechstein’s childhood was so miserable and cruel that he viewed fairy tales as “sacred,” “spiritual,” and “popular moral philosophy.”  He “Christianized” the stories, eradicating unnecessary (or unnecessarily gory) deaths and gratuitous violence and often overlaid them with more mercy.  Bechstein’s Hansel and Gretel, and therefore Humperdinck’s, did two very important things, which are specific to Bechstein’s background.  First, in the original version of the Grimm fairy tale, the children’s father is convinced, by his wife and their mother, to abandon the children.  This accurately reflects the story’s medieval roots, when the Four Horseman stalked Europe, and child abandonment and infant exposure were not uncommon for starving households.  The Grimms later softened this to a “stepmother,” who felt free to destroy her husband’s children because they had no blood relation to her.  Bechstein mollified these “bad mother” figures into a harried, impoverished and desperate biological mother.  He himself had been fostered and longed to expunge the taint of evil from the role of the adoptive or “step” parent, for as he himself said:

“Among the thousands of children who get their hands on books of fairy tales, there must be the so-called ‘stepchildren.’  When such a child—after reading many a fairytale in which stepmothers appear [and appear uniformly evil]—feels that it has been somehow injured or insulted … by its own stepmother, then that young person makes comparisons and develops a strong aversion to his guardian which … disturbs the peace and happiness of the entire family.”

Second, instead of a terrifying, red-eyed cannibal of a witch, Bechstein envisions a rather amiable (at least at first) and humorous witch.  She still wants to eat the children in the most literal way, but seems much less threatening than the haggard, peering monstrosity of Grimm.  Adelheid further subdued the appalling aspects of a cannibalistic old woman by magically transforming her victims into gingerbread boys and girls, a fate reversed by her own death and transformation into a giant cookie.  

A last change shared with Bechstein and expanded upon by Humperdinck is the role of religion.  Bechstein’s and Humperdinck’s siblings were deeply faithful, assured that “When need is at its height, the Lord God stretches forth His hand.”  In the opera, when they find themselves lost, the children share a prayer familiar to German children at the time, quoted from a 14th-century child’s tombstone:  “When at night I go to sleep, fourteen angels watch do keep …”

In sanitizing the Grimm tale, Humperdinck and Adelheid Wette created just the middle class family entertainment so missing from the prurient bloodiness of the new verismo operas electrifying audiences throughout Europe.  But in doing so, both they and Brechstein may have lost something elemental in the original folk tale—indeed to all folk tales.  Gustav Ferdinand Humperdinck, Engelbert’s and Adelheid’s father, wondered aloud at it, “I find the Grimm version preferable.”  

The old fairy tales are bloodthirsty and violent, but they also address the primal thoughts and fears of children.  They teach that real danger and betrayal can be overcome.  The gruesome outcomes that befall the “bad guy” in the stories appeal to the particularly intense need for “justice” children feel.  To paraphrase Tolkien:  children prefer justice to mercy.  Mercy is a grown-up conceit.  It is the grown-up who knows he needs mercy.  So folk tales fulfill that dark need for each villain to get his/her comeuppance.  It is no accident that so many folk tales deal with similar themes: hunger, poverty, bad mothers, being eaten, losing one’s way.  These are universal fears, the stuff of nightmares.  Some directors are revisiting the darker aspects of Hansel and Gretel, choosing to emphasize the more troubling aspects of the original story.  In doing so, they are more in keeping with the dark traditions of the flickering, fire-lit storytelling of the folk tales’ origins.  That Humperdinck’s opera provides room and space for such an examination marks it, as Strauss said, a “masterpiece of the highest quality.”

Engelbert Humperdink (1854-1921)

"At first I thought I should be a second Beethoven; presently I found that to be another Schubert would be good; then gradually, satisfied with less and less, I resigned to be a Humperdinck."

-Engelbert Humperdinck

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