Humperdinck reviews

This box set is a trip down memory lane, with flexible and attractive packaging, and above all a full text in German and English, and a long and stimulating introductory essay. Marek Janowski presents Humperdinck’s masterpiece with a light touch, very much as he did his complete Wagner series, but much more appropriately. Tempos are on the rapid side, a welcome change from the heavy-handed efforts of some recent stagings and recordings of the opera.

Royal Children is the only opera of Humperdinck’s, apart from the immortal Hansel and Gretel, to remain in the repertoire, and then only on the fringe. It isn’t hard to see why it is a rarity. Though it contains a great deal of beautiful music, it is quite long, and it is almost unremittingly gloomy. Act III is headed ‘Misery – Dead’ and its music and drama justify the title.

Nathaniel Merrill’s 1982 English-language staging is traditional but lively, Frederica Von Stade and Judith Blegen the top-quality kids and Rosalind Elias the scary-comic Witch. George Hall

As Rupert Christiansen points out in the booklet note, the defining Hänsels of the late 20th century were David Pountney’s 1950s-style ENO production and Richard Jones’s terrible-mouth nightmare, now available on a Met/EMI DVD with a superb cast.

Humperdinck’s adorable opera here receives treatment so affectionate that the two children are more likely to be killed with kindness than by the Witch. Colin Davis, long an advocate of this work, takes it at reverently expansive tempos, and that does nothing to hide the longueurs of Act III, which is musically least interesting, and has a disproportionately lengthy scene with the Witch. There is a drastic change in the style of production, too.