Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 6 - Hansel and Gretel

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 32 is a homely descendant of the enchantress Circe in The Odyssey , who turned Ulysses’s companions into swine, and of the enchantress Alcina in Ariosto’s Orlando Furios o, who turned her admirers into savage beasts. Many morals can be drawn from Hansel and Gretel —but not, perhaps, the one that is sung out, maestoso, in its closing pages: “When in need or dark despair, God will surely hear our prayer.” The broad chorale makes a superb and moving musical close to the work—but heaven has played no part in the rescue of Hansel and Gretel or the awakening of the spellbound children. They are saved by their own wits. In fact, heaven’s role is distinctly ambiguous. At the close of the forest scene, the pious tots sing their evening prayer before settling down to sleep. Fourteen angels appear to keep watch over them, and Humperdinck clothes the Dream Pantomime in music of shining, ethereal beauty. But when day dawns, the angel sentries are gone. They were as a dream. The children are left to face the menace of the Witch. Hansel and Gretel is a Wagnerian music drama with nursery subject matter. When the milk jug is broken, the orchestral climax could accompany the shattering of Wotan’s spear. The Witch’s Ride is a Ride of the Valkyrie s, but with broomsticks for mounts, instead of magic horses. The shining Dream Pantomime owes something to Lohengrin , and perhaps more to Parsifal . The finale, the awakening of the children, is in effect an apotheosis and redemption. There have been people disturbed by, and critical of, the application of Wagner’s elaborate methods to so slight a tale. But most people have loved Hansel and Gretel —loved it as children, and loved it perhaps even more as adults. And they do so for two reasons. First, because they can still share in the realities of its emotions. (The forest terrors that scare Gretel, in the second scene, are kin to those that scare Mime in the Ring ; anyone who has been alone in a forest at night must know them.) And second, because the music is so captivatingly beautiful. Humperdinck uses the same size orchestra as Wagner in Die Meistersinger , but there is no heaviness in his handling of it—only richness, warmth, delicacy, and (to quote the critic Robin Legge) “once or twice, as in the twilit woodland scene with the cuckoo, a poetry more enchanting than anything of the kind ever achieved by Wagner.” Andrew Porter was a prominent British music critic and scholar. Dan Rest Elizabeth DeShong (Hansel) and Maria Kanyova (Gretel) in Hansel and Gretel at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2012/13.