Engelbert Humperdinck

Engelbert Humperdinck

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(b Siegburg, 1 Sept 1854; d Neustrelitz, 27 Sept 1921). German composer and teacher. He studied at the Cologne Conservatory (1872-6) and at the Royal Music School in Munich (1877-9), meeting Wagner in Naples and assisting him with Parsifal at Bayreuth (1881-2). After interludes in Paris, Spain, Cologne and Mainz (working for B. Schotts Sohne), he moved to Frankfurt as a teacher and opera critic, also writing his most famous work, Hänsel and Gretel (1890-93; given its première at Weimar under Richard Strauss); by 1900 he was in Berlin, teaching, composing operas and writing Shakespearean incidental music (among his most successful work). The operatic version of Königskinder, another characteristic piece in his naive, folklike style, was first performed in New York in 1910; like Hänsel und Gretel it started from simple song settings and went through an intermediate stage to a full opera, showing Wagnerian harmonic and textural influences.

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Humperdinck, Engelbert (1854–1921), German composer, who wrote mainly operas and music for plays. He was strongly influenced by Richard Wagner, for whom he worked during the première of Parsifal in Bayreuth. Humperdinck's greatest accomplishment was the creation of the most significant German romantic fairy‐tale opera, Hänsel und Gretel (Hansel and Gretel, 1893). He wrote three other fairy‐tale operas, Die sieben Geisslein (The Seven Little Kids, 1895), Königskinder (The Royal Children, 1897), and Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty, 1902), but they could not match the enormous international success of Hansel and Gretel, which was first performed in Weimar on 23 December 1893 and directed by Richard Strauss.

The libretto for the opera was originally written by Humperdinck's sister Adelheid Wette for a family gathering, and it was later transformed into a three‐act opera. In Wette's version of the Grimms' tale, the children of a broom‐maker neglect their chores and, as punishment, they are sent into the woods by their mother to gather berries. When the father learns about this, he is horrified because he has heard about a witch in the woods who eats children. So the parents go in search of Hansel and Gretel. In the mean time, the children have become lost and, since they are exhausted, they lie down to sleep while a guardian angel keeps watch over them. The next day the children come upon the gingerbread house of the witch and begin to nibble on the gingerbread and sweets. The witch catches them and locks Hansel in a cage to fatten him up for a meal. When Gretel is asked by the witch to heat the oven, the girl pretends to be clumsy. The witch goes over to the oven to show Gretel what to do, and then the girl pushes the witch into the oven. The magic oven explodes into many pieces, and Gretel utters a magic spell and frees all the children who had been changed into gingerbread. The broom‐maker and his wife arrive, and they celebrate the reunion with their children in a festive happy ending.

Humperdinck used many of Wagner's compositional techniques and elements of folk music to write this opera. Moreover, he included numerous children's songs and repeated these melodies as leitmotivs throughout the opera. Among his other operas, The Royal Children is the only one that continues to be performed. The first versions with the libretto by Ernst Rosmer was a melodrama and was performed in Munich in 1897. The second version was expanded into an opera and had its première in the New York Metropolitan Opera House. The plot is an original one that combines various fairy‐tale figures: goose girl, prince, witch, knight, fool, broom‐maker. The goose girl flees a witch and encounters a wandering prince who falls in love with her. Both of them are driven from the city and die because they eat poisoned bread given to them by the witch.

— Thomas H. Hoernigk

Humperdinck, Engelbert (Siegburg, 1845-1921, Neustrelitz), felt an early musical vocation and by the age of 14 had set Goethe's Singspiel Claudine von Villa Bella. The award of prizes and a scholarship enabled him to turn from architecture to the study of music in Cologne (from 1872) and Munich, and to travel. In Naples he met R. Wagner (1880), who asked him to assist in the preparation of the première of Parsifal. He taught at various conservatoires, including Barcelona and Cologne, and was opera critic for the Mainzer Tagblatt (in the late 1880s) and the Frankfurter Zeitung (in 1890). From 1900 to 1920 he was director of the masterclass for composition at the Berlin Academy of Art.

Humperdinck rose to sudden and lasting fame with his fairy-tale opera Hänsel und Gretel which, first performed in 1893, is Germany's only opera of the genre that irresistibly appeals to children. His tragic melodrama Königskinder (1897), to a text by Elsa Bernstein, was reworked into another successful fairy-tale opera in 1910. His style was inspired by the German folk-song tradition, but the influence of Wagner shows in his modified use of the leitmotif and his harmonic system. His œuvre includes several operas, songs, part-songs, and incidental music to (notably) Shakespearean plays, produced by M. Reinhardt. In 1914 Reinhardt also produced Das Mirakel (1912) by K. G. Vollmoeller with music by Humperdinck, the international success of which had begun in London (as The Miracle, 1911). (In German also as Das Wunder.)

, Engelbert 1854-1921.

German composer who wrote the fairy tale opera Hansel and Gretel (1893).

• Period: Post-Romantic (1870-1909)
• Country: Germany
• Born: September 01, 1854 in Siegburg, Germany
• Died: September 27, 1921 in Neustrelitz, Germany
• Genres: Opera

Biography

Though Engelbert Humperdinck wrote a great deal of music in a variety of genres, he is best remembered for a single opera, Hänsel und Gretel (1893), based on the familiar fairy tale. Humperdinck's musical style is infused with elements of the German folk tradition, but the composer's primary influence was clearly the music of Wagner; indeed, Humperdinck worked as an assistant to the older master for a time, even providing extra music for a scene change in the premiere staging of Wagner's Parsifal in 1882. It is possible that Humperdinck's music remains, uncredited, as part of the score that has come down to posterity.

Following a conventional education at Paderborn, Humperdinck entered the Cologne Conservatory at the age of 18 and began studies in voice and composition. While a student there, he was the winner of the Mozart Stipend of Frankfurt in 1876; with the aid of its financial award, he went to Munich to study first with Franz Lachner and then with Rheinberger at the Royal Music School. While enrolled there (1877-1879), he won an award from the Mendelssohn Foundation of Berlin, following which he traveled to Italy and had the fortune to meet up with Wagner in Naples.

Written to a libretto by Humperdinck's sister Adelheid Wette (who added characters and scenes to expand the little story to operatic dimensions), Hänsel und Gretel was first presented in Weimar in December of 1893; it was quickly taken up in opera houses all over Europe, representing the perfect antidote to the chill, veristic winds blowing out of Italy at the time. Ostensibly a work for children, the opera has always found favor with audiences of all ages thanks to its odd blend of fable-like innocence and Wagnerian weight. Humperdinck's succesful blending of a children's story with his own, rather monumental, orchestral world has made Hänsel und Gretel the only post-Wagnerian work to be considered a succesful synthesis of the German master's style.

During the course of his musical career, Humperdinck supplemented his compositional activities with turns as a music editor, critic, and, at various times, a music teacher; Wagner's son Siegfried was one of his pupils. His other works, particulary the pleasant 1880 Humoreske for orchestra in E major, find occasional performances today. In the 1960s and 1970s, Humperdinck's name was again on the lips of the public; in this case, however, "Engelbert Humperdinck" was the new persona (chosen from a music dictionary) of a pop balladeer formerly known as Arnold Dorsey, fondly or not-so-fondly remembered for his stagey rendition of "Release Me." The two, needless to say, are not related. ~ All Music Guide, All Music Guide

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