The Sunday Musical Offering - The Dream Pantomine from Hansel & Gretel

I just completed a collection of lectures at the Tri-C Encore Series in Cleveland entitled Opera and the Holidays looking at compositions either composed with Christmas themes in them like Menotti's "Amahl and the Night Visitors" or works associated with the holidays like Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel". Can you name other operas that have Christmas or wintry themes associated with them? The list is relatively small.

Engelbert Humperdinck who lived at the end of the nineteenth century was a most gifted composer. After winning the Mendelssohn Prize in 1879, the twenty-five year old was off to Italy to study and learn from the masters. It was in Italy that Humperdinck had the good fortune of meeting an aging Richard Wagner. The two men became instant friends and Humperdinck assisted Wagner in the preparing the great maestro's last work Parsifal for the stage.

Opera lovers are indebted to Humperdinck's sister Adelheid Wette who asked her brother to write four tunes for a play that she was writing based on the Brothers Grimm fairytale Hansel and Gretel. The music received such enthusiastic support from the likes of Hugo Wolf and others, that Humperdinck decided to turn the work into a full fledged opera. The premiere took place on December 23, 1893 in Weimar, Germany with Richard Strauss conducting who considered the opera a "masterpiece of the highest quality."

The first performance is remembered for being somewhat of a flop due to the fact that many in the cast had come down with influenza; Hansel had sprained her ankle and was replaced by the Gretel; the second Gretel was young and had little experience on the stage; since there was a rush to get the opera on the stage, there was no money to construct the Witch's house; lastly, there was no overture(!) for the music was still at the copyist.

Lucky for music lovers, the opera was offered again in Munich and received tremendous success. It was the first complete opera to be broadcast on a radio from Covent Garden in London on January 6, 1923. The opera was also the first work to be transmitted live from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City on Christmas Day 1931.

The selection I have chosen for the Sunday Musical Offering closes the first Act of the opera and was the portion of the work that Humperdinck originally sent to Herman Levi, director of the Opera  House in Munich for consideration to be placed on the stage. This is six minutes of glorious music. You can hear the influence of Wagner. As a matter of fact there is a thesis paper that could be written comparing this sequence with the transition music to the Grail scene in Act One of Parsifal. But we will leave that for another time. Enjoy this production from the Metropolitan Opera from 1982.

Love One Another - Brian