Hansel and Gretel
Presented by Nashville Opera
7 p.m. Jan. 31 & 8 p.m. Feb. 2 at TPAC’s Polk Theater
Tickets available through Ticketmaster, 255-9600
Nashville Opera, over the last half-dozen years, has been consistently exciting. One reason is the company’s confident professionalism. Another is that each production chooses and faces a new set of risks. As executive director Carol Penterman recently explained, she and artistic director John Hoomes feel obliged not to repeat themselves. Audiences, in turn, are invited to go where they’ve not gone before—and the good news is that not only do they keep coming back for more, they also bring more people in tow for each new production.
Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, the latest episode in this ongoing adventure, delivers its final performances Thursday and Saturday. It’s a fascinating instance of what opera is all about—metabolizing the mundane into the marvelous. The work is very loosely based on the Grimm fairy tale about two children who get lost in the woods and have to outsmart a cannibalistic witch to keep from serving as her supper. But while the Grimm tale truly is grim, this version transfigures that grimness in unexpected ways.
The only Engelbert Humperdinck most music fans are aware of is the 1970s pop singer (born Gerry Dorsey) who appropriated the German composer’s name because he figured that it would be more memorable. Hänsel und Gretel is one of two operas by the original Humperdinck (d. 1921) included in Kobbé’s Opera Book. With German text by Adelheid Wette, the composer’s sister, it premiered in Weimar in 1893, Richard Strauss conducting. And indeed the opera sounds like a text written by somebody’s sister set to music that blends Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner with a dash of Johann Strauss. The result is a charming conflation of naïveté and sophistication.
John Hoomes says, “This is not a children’s opera; this is an opera about children.” Well, in this production anyway, it is both. It looks like a campfire ghost story intended to be deliciously scary. The English libretto often sounds not quite idiomatic, but it has an effective, ballad-like simplicity. The staging on opening night likewise showed a kind of stylizing analogous to puppet theater or children’s TV. The wicked witch looked, acted and sounded wonderfully wicked, and in one moment that drew spontaneous gleeful applause, she flew across the stage on her broomstick.
All this was married to quite sophisticated music. The score recalled Wagnerian colors and recurrent motives. But it especially suggested Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier married to Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus. Only one adult male voice is heard, the father’s rich baritone. Hansel is a mezzo-soprano “trouser role”; the mother and the witch are also mezzo-sopranos, Gretel and the Dew Fairy lyric sopranos. There is an 18-voice children’s chorus. The father appears in only two scenes, at the beginning and the end of the opera; the children’s one big chorus comes only at the end. Accordingly, Humperdinck’s texture is mostly deliciously feminine, and not folklorish at all.
In the abstract, this marriage of voices appears incompatible, but it’s not. The reason, I believe, is that this opera functions as dream. The overture begins with a lovely lullaby; at a key moment during the play, the children sing about their dreams and discover they have shared a single dream. From this perspective, the staging makes effective sense: All the figures as well as the setting are archetypes. The dark wood recalls Dante’s selva oscura. The chorus of dreamed angels, the wicked witch and gingerbread cottage, the last-minute rescue, the reuniting of children and parents—all this belongs to a kind of dream children often have at an early age, and adults have sometimes when very old.
This dream’s cast, from adult voices to children’s chorus, is quite strong. Several of the roles are double-cast. In alternating performances, Kirsten Gunlogson and Edith Dowd sing Hansel. Monica Yunus and Carolyne Eberhardt sing Gretel. Gwendolyn Jones and Belmont’s Emily Bullock sing the wicked witch. Jeff Morrisey and Kevin Kees sing the father. Nashville’s Marcia Jones Thom sings an intense but altogether sympathetic mother, and Belmont alumna Julie Cox sings the Sandman/Dew Fairy.
One of this production’s most memorable moments comes at the end of the first act. As the exhausted Hansel and Gretel fall asleep in the dark forest, a chorus of angel-children enters and forms a circle around them. The children stand motionless as four adult angels from the Nashville Ballet dance a graceful and elegant emblem of beneficence, choreographed by artistic director Paul Vasterling. This one scene alone suggests that Vasterling may well do for Nashville Ballet what the Penterman/Hoomes team is doing for Nashville Opera.
Neither the opera nor the ballet could do what they do without the Nashville Symphony, whose associate conductor, Byung-Hyun Rhee, led this robust performance. The collaboration among these three arts groups brought out all of their strengths in service of one common goal, and proved that the performing arts in Nashville are as strong as they’ve ever been.
