Paul Cooke considers Engelbert Humperdinck
For a composer nearing 40 years of age, Hansel and Gretel was a turning point for Humperdinck. He became famous overnight and financially independent, receiving more than 400 unsolicited librettos from hopeful collaborators. Humperdinck was fêted by his contemporaries: Richard Strauss, to whom he had sent the completed score, conducted the premiere of Hansel and Gretel in Weimar in 1893 and thought it ‘a masterpiece of the highest quality’, praising its ‘heartwarming humour’ and its ‘delightfully naive musical idiom’. Mahler conducted it in Hamburg within the year, and Brahms attended the first performance in Vienna, where it was accorded ‘a great success … The composer was called for 16 times by the enthusiastic audience’.
It was very quickly being performed in opera houses throughout Europe and finally made its way to Australia in 1907, opening in Melbourne on the afternoon of Saturday 6 April. Press reviews of the time noted that the music was splendidly played, but that Johanna Heinze (playing the Witch) “cavorted round on the broom in a manner so unreal and amateurish that it would have saved her from the pond and the stake a couple of hundred years ago”.
For a composer nearing 40 years of age,
Hansel and Gretel was a turning point for Humperdinck. He became famous overnight and financially independent, receiving more than 400 unsolicited librettos from hopeful collaborators. Humperdinck was fêted by his contemporaries: Richard Strauss, to whom he had sent the completed score, conducted the premiere of Hansel and Gretel in Weimar in 1893 and thought it ‘a masterpiece of the highest quality’, praising its ‘heartwarming humour’ and its ‘delightfully naive musical idiom’.
Mahler conducted it in Hamburg within the year, and Brahms attended the first performance in Vienna, where it was accorded ‘a great success … The composer was called for 16 times by the enthusiastic audience’. It was very quickly being performed in opera houses throughout Europe and finally made its way to Australia in 1907, opening in Melbourne on the afternoon of Saturday 6 April. Press reviews of the time noted that the music was splendidly played, but that Johanna Heinze (playing the Witch) “cavorted round on the broom in a manner so unreal and amateurish that it would have saved her from the pond and the stake a couple of hundred years ago”.
The success of Hansel and Gretel can possibly be attributed to the way Humperdinck synthesised his various influences. Supernatural themes had held sway in German opera since Weber’s Der Freischütz, but Humperdinck infused this with a seriousness deriving from Wagnerian harmonies and orchestration and reflected in undercurrents of poverty and deprivation. At the same time, he leavened the portentousness with tuneful melodies, often influenced by folk song.
Humperdinck composed four other operas and also worked in other genres. Most of his chamber music was written during his student years, before he had come under Wagner’s influence; while it was not his preferred mode of expression, he composed music for the private circle of the judge, and amateur violinist, Johannes Degen. Between 1905 and 1908 he wrote incidental music for a variety of Shakespeare’s plays. These were taken up and performed in more than 300 theatres up until World War II, and Humperdinck himself adapted them into suites for concert use.
The composer was increasingly unwell from about this time. He would occasionally take rest at the Berlin villa of Isadora Duncan (he had apparently once written music for her to dance to). Humperdinck suffered a stroke in 1912, causing permanent paralysis of his left hand; in 1914 he applied for the position of director at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, but was unsuccessful, due both to his ill-health and his nationality. He continued to compose, completing Gaudeamus, with his son Wolfram in 1918, and in 1920, a string quartet which harked back to his student days. Humperdinck died in 1921, the day after attending a performance of Der Freischütz for which Wolfram was stage director.