HUMPERDINCK: HANSEL AND GRETEL ( $4.99 for 72 hours rental )

Conductor  Vladimir Jurowski

Gretel  Christine Schäfer

Hansel  Alice Coote

Gertrude  Rosalind Plowright

Peter  Alan Held

The Sandman  Sasha Cooke

The Dew Fairy  Lisette Oropesa

The Witch  Philip Langridge

Act I
Hansel complains he is hungry. Gretel shows him some milk that a neighbour has given for the family’s supper. The children dance. Their mother returns and wants to know why they have got so little work done. She accidentally spills the milk, and chases the children out into the woods to pick strawberries.

Their father 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, and that the children are in danger. They go out into the woods to look for them.

Act II
Hansel picks strawberries. They 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 do not notice the Witch. The Witch decides to fatten Hansel up. 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.

Hansel and Gretal

Originally conceived as a small-scale vocal entertainment for children, Hansel and Gretel resonates with both adults and children, and has become one of the most successful fairy-tale operas ever created. The composer, Engelbert Humperdinck, was a protégé of Richard Wagner, and the opera’s score is flavoured with the sophisticated musical lessons he learned from his idol while maintaining a charm and a light touch that were entirely Humperdinck’s own. The folk tale of the siblings who get lost in a dark forest and become captives of an old witch is a classic of German literature, made famous in the collected stories of the Brothers Grimm. The opera acknowledges the darker features present in the Brothers Grimm version, yet presents them within a frame of grace and humour. Richard Strauss was delighted with Humperdinck’s score and conducted its world premiere. Hansel and Gretel has been internationally popular ever since and is one of the very few operas that can claim equal approval from such diverse and demanding critics as children and musicologists.
The Creators

Engelbert Humperdinck (1854–1921) was a German composer who began his career as an assistant to Richard Wagner in Bayreuth in a variety of capacities, including tutoring Wagner’s son Siegfried in music and composition. Humperdinck even composed a few measures of orchestral music for the world premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) when extra time was needed for a scene change. (This music is not included in the printed score of Parsifal and is no longer performed.) Hansel and Gretel was Humperdinck’s first complete opera and remains the foundation of his reputation. The world premiere of his opera Königskinder took place at the Met and was one of the sensations of the company’s 1910–11 season. The libretto for Hansel and Gretel was written by his sister, Adelheid Wette (1858–1916), and is based on the version found in the Brothers Grimm collection of folk stories. Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859) Grimm were German academics whose groundbreaking linguistic work revolutionized the understanding of language development. Today, they are best remembered for editing and publishing collections of folk tales.

The Setting
The opera’s three acts move from Hansel and Gretel’s home to the dark forest to the Witch’s gingerbread house deep in the forest. Put another way, the drama moves from the real, through the obscure, and into the unreal and fantastical. In this production, which takes the idea of food as its dramatic focus, each act is set in a different kind of kitchen, informed by a different theatrical style: a D.H. Lawrence-inspired setting in the first, a German Expressionist one in the second, and a Theatre of the Absurd mood in the third.

The Music
The score of Hansel and Gretel combines accessible charm with subtle sophistication. Like Wagner, Humperdinck assigns musical themes to certain ideas and then transforms the themes according to new developments in the drama. The chirpy cuckoo, for example, is depicted by wind instruments in

Act II that become increasingly frightening as night descends on the children, who are lost in the forest. The vocal parts also reflect this method. Unlike Wagner, however, Humperdinck uses separate songs (with real folk songs among them) within his scheme. In Act I, for example, Gretel tells her brother that God will provide for them, using a bouncy and naïve tune that suggests a prayer a child might learn by heart but not fully understand. In Act II, this becomes the children’s beautiful and heartfelt prayer, which then triggers the magical dream sequence of guardian angels that closes the act. Similarly, Gretel’s dance tune in Act I morphs into the father’s solemn prayer of thanksgiving for a happy ending at the opera’s finale. The music, like the children, seems to grow up over the course of the evening. The role of the Witch, written for a mezzo-soprano, is sometimes (as in the present production) sung by a tenor.

The Fairy tale

Hansel and Gretel (German: Hänsel und Gretel) is a fairy tale of Germanic origin, recorded by the Brothers Grimm. The story follows a young brother and sister who discover a house of candy and cake in the forest and a child-devouring witch. The tale has been adapted to various media, most notably the opera Hänsel und Gretel (1893) by Engelbert Humperdinck and a stop-motion animated feature film based on the opera.

Origin

"Hansel and Gretel" is one of several European tales in which children outwit an ogre into whose hands they have fallen. Their plight is involuntary, unlike the hero of the 'Jack' tales who actively seeks monsters and ogres in order to obtain loot, engage in blood sports, or win enduring glory. The Grimm brothers learned "Hansel and Gretel" in Cassel from the young girl Dortchen Wild, who years later would become Wilhelm Grimm's wife. The basic elements of the tale are found throughout the world, although their simplicity makes it hard to tell whether a given instance is a borrowing or an independent invention. Another theory is that Hansel and Gretel is one of the first cases of what would nowadays be called industrial espionage. During medieval times when the story happened, the patent system was not in place yet and all trade secrets were handed down as family lore. Allegedly, the recipe for gingerbread was one such trade/family secret and the villagers sent out two children, i.e. Hansel and Gretel, to spy on the woman who owned the recipe. The children were caught by the woman and incarcerated but well fed. The villagers, however, came to their rescue and in the process killed and burned the baker. The tale was spun as a cover-up for the crime.

The tale from the Brothers Grimm was meant to be a pleasant fable for middle-class consumers of the 19th century; the original however was probably an admonishment of the hardships of medieval life. Abandoning children in the woods to die or fend for themselves because of famine, war, plague or other reasons, was not unknown, in particular during the crisis of the Late Middle Ages. Many critics have posited that the tale likely stemmed from historical instances of abandonment caused by famine; see the works of Jack Zipes and Maria Tatar for example.

In the first editions of the Grimms' collection, there was no stepmother; the mother persuaded the father to abandon her own children. This change, as in Snow White, appears to be a deliberate toning down of the unpleasantness for society in general who can't bear to think of mothers trying to hurt and kill their own children.

That the mother or stepmother happens to die when the children have killed the witch has suggested to many commentators that the mother or stepmother and the witch are, in fact, the same woman, or at least that an identity between them is strongly hinted at. Indeed, a Russian folk tale exists in which the evil stepmother (also the wife of a poor woodcutter) asks her hated stepdaughter to go into the forest to borrow a light from her sister, who turns out to be Baba Yaga, who is also a cannibalistic witch. Besides highlighting the endangerment of children (as well as their own cleverness), they both have in common a preoccupation with food and with hurting children; the mother or stepmother wants to avoid hunger, while the witch lures children to eat her house of candy so that she can then eat them.

Source: Wikipedia