Hansel and Gretel by Humperdinck, ons. 05 feb. 2020, Fra (2019/2020), Instrueret af Sigrid Herzog,, Dirigent Marie Jacquot, André Callegaro, Gabor Hontvári, Mainfranken Theater, Würzburg, Germany

I've finished Hansel and Gretel and I think you'll like it... For the time being I'm sending you the things to be set to music and I beg you, dearest Angel-Beard, help, help quickly! ... Now be nice, brother, and make me something really pretty, folksy; this is my most successful little work and really my favorite child.” (Adelheid Wette, 1890) Only a few composers concentrate the perception of their work on a single work as in the case of Engelbert Humperdinck. Born in 1854, he had hardly received any public recognition up to the end of the 1880s and made ends meet as a teacher at the Hoch Conservatory and as a reviewer for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Humperdinck's big breakthrough came with the so-called "Kinderstuben-Weihfestspiel" "Hansel and Gretel" based on Wagner's Parsifal. It is his first fully worked out opera, to a libretto by his sister Adelheid Wette, four years his junior, and based on the well-known fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. The Weimar premiere on December 23, 1893, conducted by Richard Strauss, established “Hänsel und Gretel” almost exclusively as a Christmas opera from the start. The generic term "fairy tale play" broadens the scope of interpretation but also to the abysmal play of symbols about life, death and redemption. The misguided path of the children, it leads not only into the dark forest, but also into the homeless and eerie undergrowth of the soul.