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2 results

  • (Trans)National Fairy Tale and Romantic Childhood: Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel through its Parisian Reception

  • T. F. Coombes
  • Journal:
    Cambridge Opera Journal / Volume 33 / Issue 1-2 / March 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 April 2022, pp. 50-70

  • Around 1900, Engelbert Humperdinck and Adelheid Wette's Hänsel und Gretel was one of the most widely performed operas in Europe. The critical discourse prompted by its Paris premiere provides an opportunity for exploring the political dynamics of nineteenth-century fairy tales and for elucidating the piece's considerable historical significance. Although Humperdinck's opera was a prime vehicle for perpetuating Franco-German cultural competition, a prominent strand of its Parisian reception emphasised transnational commonalities linking French and German cultural heritage – an emphasis facilitated by the fairy tale's nationalist ideologies. According to some Parisian critics, the opera's wildly successful representation of childhood explained its international success. Certainly, Hänsel und Gretel embodied an influential perception of childhood that also animated late nineteenth-century French literary and political spheres. In so doing, the opera also gave musical and dramatic shape to some highly restrictive aspects of the Romantic image of the divinely protected child.

  • Chapter 23 - Post-Wagnerian Opera

  • from Part IV - Professional and Musical Contexts
  • Edited by Morten Kristiansen, Joseph E. Jones
  • Book:
    Richard Strauss in Context
    Published online:
    08 October 2020
    Print publication:
    29 October 2020, pp 209-217

  • Summary

    Of the German-language operas composed between Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) and Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905), only Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (1893) has survived. This chapter surveys the mostly forgotten works that form the context of Strauss’s early operas. In addition to his musical style, Wagner’s concept of redemption through love and reception of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics exerted a powerful influence on the next generation, as seen in music dramas by Max von Schillings (Ingwelde), Pfitzner (Der arme Heinrich), and Strauss (Guntram). The new genre of fairy tale opera (Märchenoper) often presented lighter versions of Wagnerian style and ideology, such as in Hänsel und Gretel, Alexander Ritter’s Der faule Hans, and Siegfried Wagner’s Der Bärenhäuter. Even comic opera was strongly influenced, bifurcating into Meistersinger spinoffs (Schillings’s Der Pfeifertag) and harmless bourgeois idylls (Eugen d’Albert’s Die Abreise). Verismo-influenced hybrids include d’Albert’s Tiefland and Wilhelm Kienzl’s Der Evangelimann. Strauss’s Salome represented an act of liberation.