The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (23 page)

Engelbert Humperdinck

(1854–1921)

Hänsel
und
Gretel

Three acts. First performed Weimar, 1893.

Libretto by Adelheid Wette

This delightful and surprisingly powerful opera began as a domestic entertainment, devised for the composer’s sister and her children.
When Richard Strauss received the complete score, he declared it ‘a masterpiece of the highest quality’, and it has remained a hugely popular Christmas show ever since.
The plot is drawn from a tale by the Brothers Grimm.

Plot

In the absence of their parents, little Hänsel and Gretel are playing when they should be working at household chores.
The family is very poor and hungry, and when their harassed mother bursts in on their games, she is so angry that she sends them out into the forest to gather strawberries.
Her husband cheerfully returns from work with a bag of food, but he is alarmed at the children’s absence, remembering tales of a witch with a taste for children.
Both parents rush into the forest to find Hänsel and Gretel.

The children are now thoroughly lost in the forest and fall asleep, watched over by the benign Sandman and Dew Fairy.
The children are very hungry and begin to nibble at a strange hut made of gingerbread.
Out of its front door jumps the Witch, who imprisons Hänsel in a cage and forces Gretel to help with the oven, announcing that she is fattening Hänsel up.
But Gretel manages to free Hänsel and together the children push the witch into her own oven.
The spells are broken, and children who have previously fallen victim to the witch’s machinations are restored to life.
Hänsel and Gretel’s parents are relieved to find their children safe, and all ends happily.

What to listen for

Hänsel
und
Gretel
is rich in the simple folk-song and dance-tunes of Schubert and Weber’s era, but its rich-textured orchestration and thematic intricacy evince the Wagnerian influence – Humperdinck actually assisted Wagner on
Parsifal.
Hänsel is generally sung by a mezzo-soprano and poses no problems; Gretel is trickier – although the composer evidently intended the role to be sung by a girlish soubrette soprano, the heavy orchestration tends to drown such voices.
The aria for the Sandman is lushly beautiful, and on recordings is taken by sopranos of the calibre of Kiri Te Kanawa.
Veteran mezzo-sopranos enjoy hamming it up as the Witch – a role also taken on occasion by character tenors.

In performance

Many productions are specifically geared to children and will be staged in traditional pantomime style, but
Hänsel
und
Gretel
is a good enough opera to stand up to ‘adult’ treatment. At ENO, David Pountney’s staging set the opera on a suburban estate, and doubled the role of the mother with that of the Witch, suggesting parallels with modern fears of ‘child abuse’.
For WNO, Richard Jones presented the piece as a dark fantasy of a child’s relationship with food, hunger and greed, depicting the Witch’s kitchen as a vast steel-lined industrial plant geared to mass catering.

Recording

CD: Ann Murray (Hänsel), Edita Gruberova (Gretel); Colin Davis (cond.).
Philips 438 013 2

Richard Strauss

(1864–1949)

Salome

One act. First performed Dresden, 1905.

Libretto by Oscar Wilde, translated by Hedwig Lachmann

Salome
was Strauss’s third opera.
Its biblically based subject-matter and modernist musical style caused an immediate sensation and led to protests, official condemnation and even bans in several cities.
Once the fuss died down, it emerged as a masterly piece of
fin-de-siècle
decadence, with its glittering orchestration, powerful characterization and grisly fascination with extreme psychological states.
The text skilfully trims the text of Oscar Wilde’s florid play, originally written in French in 1893.

Plot

Salome is the daughter of Herodias by her first marriage.
Now Herodias is married to Herod, Tetrarch of Judea, who has imprisoned John the Baptist, ‘Jokanaan’, in an underground cistern for preaching dangerous new doctrine and denouncing the decadence of Herod and his court.

Narraboth guards the cistern: he is obsessed with the beautiful teenage Salome, who has left Herod’s banquet, disgusted by her stepfather’s lustful looks and the dinner-table arguments of the Jews and Romans.
Salome persuades Narraboth to open the cistern and fetch Jokanaan.
Despite his fierce insults and refusal to look at her, she is erotically fascinated by Jokanaan’s powerful presence.
Jokanaan is sent back into the cistern, but Narraboth cannot bear to see Salome in love with another and kills himself.

Herod and Herodias appear: he is fearful of ill omens, she loathes Jokanaan, who shouts curses from the cistern.
The Jews quarrel with the Nazarenes, and there is talk of another miracle-working prophet in the land – is he the Messiah, some ask.
Herod lasciviously asks Salome to dance for him.
Despite her mother’s disapproval, she agrees on the condition that when she has finished, he will give her whatever she asks.
Her dance involves the seductive shedding of seven diaphanous veils.
Herod is enthralled, but his superstitious nature recoils in horror when Salome asks for her reward – the head of Jokanaan on a silver platter.
He offers her untold riches instead, but she persists.
Finally, Herod yields and Jokanaan’s severed head is laid before Salome.
Deliriously she picks it up and reflects on what could have been: ‘If you had looked at me, you would have loved me.’ Herodias is delighted to be rid of Jokanaan, but when Salome kisses Jokanaan’s bleeding mouth, Herod can take no more: he orders his soldiers to kill Salome, and they crush her beneath their shields.

What to listen for

Strauss once admitted that
Salome
might on first hearing sound like ‘a symphony with accompanying vocal parts’, and much of the piece’s power and originality is concentrated in the brilliant manipulation of the colours of the instrumental palette (for example, the short stabbing strokes on the bridge of the double bass, indicative of Salome holding her breath while Jokanaan is being executed).
Coldly analysed and unpicked, a lot of the melodies (such as the tunes which make up the Dance of the Seven Veils) are banal, and Strauss is too ready to turn up the volume and pile up the notes in order to make an effect – the opera uses an enormous orchestra.
Yet
Salome
provides a totally enthralling experience in the theatre, grounded in a flawless dramatic structure which moves inexorably over its hundred-minute span without a second’s waste or tedium.

The role of Salome is alluring but difficult, ranging from a high B to low G flat, and requiring sufficient reserves of power and breath to ride the orchestral tumult of the duet with Jokanaan and the long final monologue in which Salome makes love to the severed head.
And how many sopranos have the right bodies to impersonate convincingly the role of a beautiful teenage temptress?
Teresa Stratas, Julia Migenes
and Maria Ewing are among those who could look and sound sweet sixteen, but didn’t have the heft to ride the climaxes; the more Amazonian Anja Silja and Catherine Malfitano lacked the silky innocence of voice that the music ideally requires.
Singers of ampler physique often avoid embarrassment by deputizing the business of the Seven Veils to a professional dancer.
Both Herod and Herodias present great opportunities for older sopranos (or mezzo-sopranos) and character tenors to indulge in melodramatic histrionics – neither has much to sing.

There are three slightly different versions of the opera: the original score of 1905; a revision which Strauss made in 1930 with the aim of reducing some of the orchestration so that lighter-voiced sopranos could sing Salome; and a later revision made to accommodate Wilde’s original French text.
The second is the edition most commonly used in opera houses today.

In performance