Hansel and Gretel by Humperdinck, søn. 06 jan. 2019, Fra (2018/2019), Instrueret af Achim Freyer, Geertje Boeden, Dirigent Christopher Moulds, Thomas Guggeis, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, Germany

Who doesn't know the fairy tale of children who get lost in the woods and discover a witch's gingerbread house that she wants to eat like a cannibal? In Engelbert Humperdinck's opera, we first experience the depressing everyday reality of a family living below the poverty line: because the poor broommaker's children prefer to play and romp instead of helping around the house, and the only food they eat accidentally spills, their mother sends Hansel and Gretel to pick berries to make up for it The forest. There, however, the siblings not only meet good-natured figures such as the sand and dew man, but also the witch from Ilsenstein, who invites them into her little house brimming with delicacies ... Thanks to the imaginative combination of naïve melodies reminiscent of children's songs, magical natural romance and artful tonal painting as well symphonic waves of sound worked out with leitmotifs, as we know them from Richard Wagner's music dramas, his former collaborator Humperdinck achieved his breakthrough as an opera composer with »Hänsel und Gretel«. The "Kinderstuben-Weihfestspiel", as he called his sister Adelheid Wette's early Singspiel, became a humorous story