Hänsel und Gretel

Performances of Englebert Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel have generally followed traditional staging and setting; Act I finding the children at home, Act II in the woods, and Act III at the witch's house. Johannes Felsenstein's Dessau production breaks with tradition, choosing to focus on the abject poverty and domestic abuse inherent in the original fairytale. In Felsenstein's version, Hansel and Gretel never leave their home. Hiding under their beds, they bear witness to their mother's wretchedness, their father's drunken abusiveness, and both parents' naïve superstition of things that go bump in the woods. The second act finds the children still under their beds. Leaving the children at home emphasizes their fear of domestic violence and deprivation. The severity of their situation is underscored in Gretel's text; she sings fearfully, "We cannot just linger here." Her words are all the more tragic because the children aren't in the woods trying to get home; they are home trying to get away. The children fall asleep in their own beds and dream of fourteen angels and a loving mother and father. In the third act, Hansel and Gretel awake on a Christmas Eve scene. The confrontation with the witch becomes a game played with their adoring father. The act ends with the "adoption" of the fourteen angels (children representing various nations) from the second act. They gather around a table, now big enough for all of them, as Father sings of placing trust in God.

There are various ways to interpret this production. Each act begins with archive film footage from World Wars I and II and Vietnam with focus placed on orphaned or abandoned children. This suggests a sociocritical reading, wherein "the realism in the first act, where child labour is another ingredient, is striking and stands in sharp relief from the following scenes, which should be seen more as the children's dream visions" (Göran Forsling, review of Hänsel und Gretel [DVD]. MusicWeb Inter national, http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2009/Feb09/Humperdinck_Hansel_101321.htm [accessed 18 November 2009]). It is a dream, however, from which, the children never awaken. This suggests a darker reading of Felsen stein's production, one in which Hansel and Gretel die at the end of the second act, and the angels they sing of actually arrive to take them to heaven. They are next revealed in a child's paradise (i.e., Christmas) with kind and loving parents, games and dolls and gingerbread; they never return to the home they were so desperate to get away from.

Admirers of the Fassbaender/Gruberova movie or the Schäfer/Coote Met production may be disappointed. Cornelia Marschall shines as Gretel, with light and flexible tone, but Sabine Noack (Hansel) and Alexandra Petersamer (Mother) sound at times labored and shrill. Ludmil Kuntschew (Father/Witch) has the weakest voice but makes up for it in energy and expression. The production quality is excellent, capturing the rich, warm sound of the Anhaltische Philharmonie Dessau. Sets and staging are both haunting and vibrant; relationships between the characters are natural and believable. The production is self-contained and coherent; easily enjoyable and relevant for children and adults.