We have a Christmas favorite on this week’s Sunday Opera (12/21 3:00 p.m.) as we turn to Englebert Humperdinck’s 1892 Marchenoper or “fairytale opera,” “Hansel and Gretel” in an English Translation by Tom Hammond.
From it’s inception by Humperdinck’s sister Adelheid Wette, this version of “Hansel and Gretel” has been a Christmas work. Originally, Adelheid wrote poems based on the characters in the Brothers Grimm story to be read to her children at Christmastime. She asked Englebert if he would write music to turn her poems into songs, and he did so. However, he was so taken by the outcome that he decided to turn it into an opera which premiered in Weimar on December 23, 1893.
Most people know the story although the opera does differ from the original. In the Brothers Grimm version, the mother is a stepmother who convinces the father to take the children into the middle of the forest so that the parents might escape the famine that is imminent. Most of the adventures the children have are similar in both, but in the original, the stepmother dies, and just their father comes looking for them. When Gretel tricks the witch and kills her in the oven, there is no “rebirth” for the children who have been baked and turned into gingerbread in the original. Hansel and Gretel pocket the witch’s jewels and take them to their father.
As a refresher, Hansel (Susanne Mentzer) and Gretel (Heidi Grant Murphy) are not doing their chores, and when Mother (Janice Taylor) returns from her errands, she scolds the children, breaking the filled milk pitcher in the process. Mother gets so angry that she sends the children into the woods to pick strawberries.
When Father (Robert Orth) returns from a profitable day of selling brooms, Mother tells him where the children are, and he immediately panics as the woods are home to an evil witch (Judith Forst) who eats children.
The children kill the witch, and as she dies, all of the children who have been baked into gingerbread are reborn.
Also in the cast is Anna Christy in the dual roles of Sandman and Dewdrop Fairy and the Milwaukee Children’s Choir and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. Andreas Delfs conducts.
We’ll finish our time together with a wonderful collection of symphonic adaptations of Christmas carols by Patric Stanford, William Henry Fry, Brian Kelly, Victor Hely-Hutchinson, Leroy Andreson, Franz Liszt (adapted by Phillip Lane and Gordon Jacob), and Benjamin Britten for two-hours of festive Christmas listening.
