Engelbert Humperdinck

German composer

• Born: September 1, 1854
• Birthplace: Siegburg, near Bonn, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: September 27, 1921
• Place of death: Neustrelitz, Germany

As the developer and chief exponent of “fairy-tale” operas, Humperdinck was briefly the most important German opera composer after Richard Wagner. Although he was soon eclipsed by other composers, his music survives in one enduringly popular work, Hänsel und Gretel.

Early Life

Engelbert Humperdinck (HEWM-pahr-dihngk) was born in a small Rhineland town where his father was a teacher. Family pressures destined Humperdinck for a career in architecture, but he evidenced an early interest in music and began to study it around the age of seven. By his early teens, he was composing and was active in a number of musical organizations. After overcoming parental opposition to a musical career, he studied at the Cologne Conservatory for four years. In 1876 he won Frankfurt’s Mozart Prize, which allowed him to study further in Munich. Some early compositions were performed during this period that demonstrated the influence of Richard Wagner . After winning Berlin’s Mendelssohn Prize in 1879, he was able to travel to Italy, where he met his idol Wagner, who was then vacationing in Naples. Impressed by the twenty-five-year-old Humperdinck’s honesty and geniality, Wagner soon drew the young man into his circle.

In Bayreuth, Humperdinck became Wagner’s right-hand man during preparations for the premiere of the opera Parsifal in 1882. As chief copyist of the score, Humperdinck was called upon to add some music of his own; part of his contribution was eventually dropped, but it is likely that significant portions of what he wrote, especially in the area of the orchestration, remained in the final version of Wagner’s last opera. Humperdinck fulfilled numerous other responsibilities while working with Wagner. However, after winning the Meyerbeer Prize of Berlin in 1881, Humperdinck broke free in the autumn of 1882 to take up residence in Paris, France. Wagner tried to get his young disciple to join him in Venice at the Marcello Conservatory, but this arrangement failed, although Humperdinck did assist Wagner in preparing for the latter’s final performance. When Humperdinck returned to Paris, he was followed by the news of his idol’s death on February 13, 1883.

In the following years, Humperdinck traveled widely around Europe and the Mediterranean. After an unhappy spell of teaching in Barcelona, Spain, he took an appointment at his alma mater, the Cologne Conservatory, in 1887. He also became adviser to the important music publishing firm of Schott and an active music critic. Still close to the Wagner family, he gave private music lessons to the late master’s son, Siegfried. Like Humperdinck himself, Siegfried had been expected to train as an architect; perhaps recalling his own escape, Humperdinck was influential in steering the young man toward a career of his own as conductor and composer.

Humperdinck had not given up his interests in composing. An orchestral humoresque that he wrote met with some success, and he had composed a steady number of songs for voice and piano as well as choral pieces. However, his dreams of writing opera had gone unrealized: Wagner’s lingering influence weighed heavily on him, and he had failed to find the right material. It was only when Humperdinck moved to new teaching and journalistic duties in Frankfurt that his breakthrough came.

Life’s Work

In the spring of 1891, Humperdinck’s sister, Adelheid Wette, a literary dabbler, invited him to join in one of her private theatricals using her children’s miniature theater. She had adapted one of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales as a Singspiel (a spoken play with songs and musical numbers), and she asked him to provide appropriate musical settings. The finished production was presented at a party for family and friends a few weeks later. One of the guests was Hugo Wolf, whose compositions Humperdinck had supported through his publishing connections. Wolf thought this tiny theatrical piece should be made into a full-length opera. Wette set to work on an expanded libretto and, though the idea of performability by children persisted, the project grew into the opera Hänsel und Gretel .

Securing a performance for the new work proved to be difficult at first, but parallel productions—at Weimar on December 23, 1893, under Richard Strauss, and two weeks later at Munich under old Bayreuth colleague Hermann Levi—caused a sensation. Critics who had bemoaned the lapse in German opera after Wagner’s death and who were alarmed at the inroads made by the new Italian verismo movement hailed Humperdinck’s work as bringing new life to German lyric theater. The opera swept through Europe and traveled around the world, establishing a barely matched record of unbroken popularity.

In his fusion of complex Wagnerian style (sumptuous orchestral apparatus and modified use of leitmotif references) with a folksy simplicity of tone (the feeling of a folk song and the naïve subject matter of folktales), Humperdinck unintentionally created what he recognized as a new idiom, the Märchenoper or fairy-tale opera. He moved quickly to consolidate the new audience he had created for his music. Another collaboration with his sister, Die sieben Geisslein (the seven little goats) was well received in 1895, but it failed to capture any lasting public interest. Meanwhile, after reluctantly being drawn into writing incidental music for a play by a friend’s daughter, Königskinder (the king’s children), Humperdinck turned it into a melodrama—a form of drama with lines spoken over closely keyed music. He went further, notating rhythms and pitches for the spoken words. It was an idea that anticipated the Sprechgesang (speech-song), which was soon to become part of the radical style of Arnold Schoenberg, but it proved too demanding for the performers in a doomed production that turned into a fiasco when it premiered in 1897.

After relocating to Berlin, Humperdinck returned to the fairy-tale idiom with Dornröschen (Thorn-Rosie), an adaptation of the Charles Perrault tale commonly known as “The Sleeping Beauty.” This new confection of sumptuous Wagnerian orchestration and childish naïveté with spectacular stage effects was highly acclaimed at its Frankfurt premiere on November 12, 1902, but once again it could not win the same popularity as Hänsel und Gretel and slipped quickly into obscurity. A shift into comedy was attempted with Die Heirat wider Willen (the involuntary marriage), with a libretto by Humperdinck’s wife, based upon Alexandre Dumaspère’s drama Les Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr (1843; The Ladies of Saint-Cyr, 1870). Despite a lavish premiere in April, 1905, and praises accorded its music, a weak libretto (with copious spoken dialogue) doomed the work to neglect.

Still committed to theatrical composition, Humperdinck produced a Nativity-play opera for children, Bübschens Weihnachtstraum (1906; toddler’s Christmas dream), and then turned to writing a series of highly praised incidental scores for productions (mostly by Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin) of plays by William Shakespeare, Aristophanes, and Maurice Maeterlinck. However, he felt bound to give the fairy-tale opera one more effort to prove that the success of Hänsel und Gretel had not been a one-time aberration.

Returning to the Königskinder play, which had been an abortive melodrama, Humperdinck decided to utilize his original idea and make it into a full-fledged opera by recasting the earlier text and overhauling his previous music. The premiere, arranged at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, took place, after many delays, in December, 1910, in the same month as that of Giacomo Puccini’s La fanciulla del west (the girl of the golden West). Puccini’s opera, which went on to survive as a part of the working international repertoire, was coolly received at first, while Humperdinck’s work (now long forgotten) was ecstatically acclaimed for its beautiful music and theatrical effects.

At a seeming pinnacle of success and fame, Humperdinck composed a pantomime opera called Das Mirakel (the miracle). However, at its London premiere in December, 1911, Humperdinck suffered a physical breakdown that initiated a deterioration of his health that plagued him for the remaining decade of his life. He continued to travel and compose, producing two more operas (in 1914 and 1919) that achieved no success at all and writing in other vocal and instrumental forms as well. Still receiving international honors, he retired from his Berlin posts in 1920, only to die on September 27 of the following year at the age of sixty-seven.

Significance

Engelbert Humperdinck was not exclusively an operatic composer. Besides other vocal music, he produced one major orchestral work—the Moorish Rhapsody (1899)—three string quartets (1873, 1875, and 1920), and a quintet for piano and strings (1875). However, it was in the theater that he felt most at home and strove to make his mark.

It was already clear by the time of his death that Humperdinck’s successes had mostly become ephemeral. His early champion, Richard Strauss, had stolen a march on him: After establishing his commanding position as a composer of German orchestral music, Strauss had then assumed true leadership in German opera with his scandalous and decadent Salome (1905) and the shocking and brutal Elektra (1909), followed by the mellow Der Rosenkavalier (1911). With his operatic initiative taken away, Humperdinck also found himself adrift in the larger musical world being shaken by Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Bela Bartók. The idiom of the fairy-tale opera, which satisfied German cultural appetites of the moment, was actually built upon the illusion that the traditions of Romanticism were still vehicles for continued growth. Wagner’s “music of the future” had quickly become a stale reaction in its own turn, for the musical world was rapidly moving into radical experiments with alternatives that left Humperdinck’s aesthetics far behind.

Some of Humperdinck’s music is still heard, and, at least in German houses, Königskinder and even Dornröschen might occasionally be revived. However, Humperdinck has survived in the dubious status of a one-work composer. Hänsel und Gretel—whether in the original German or as translated into almost every Western language—has curiously escaped the eclipse of everything else Humperdinck created amid such optimism. Its appeal to children as well as adults has given it an almost unique role as an introductory opera, and it has become an unshakable staple of Christmas performances. It is also, quite simply, a score filled with gorgeous music—the first and only true Märchenoper, but one that justly deserves its enduring popularity.

Bibliography

Abell, Arthur M. Talks with Great Composers. Secaucus, N.J.: Carol, 1994. The most recent reprint of a book originally published in 1955. Contains interviews with Humperdinck and other composers conducted between 1890 and 1917; the composers discuss their musical works and the creative process.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. This book contains an analysis of the original fairy-tale form of the Hansel and Gretel story, which is still useful despite the decline in the author’s reputation.

Denley, Ian. “Engelbert Humperdinck.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Terrell. 2d ed. London: Grove, 2001. This article discusses Humperdinck’s life, works, musical style, and the critical reception of his music. Includes a list of his musical works and a bibliography that does not include any materials written in English.

Humperdinck, Wolfram. Engelbert Humperdinck: Das Leben meines Vaters. Frankfort-am-Main, Germany: Kramer, 1965. A German-language biography of Humperdinck.

Irmen, Hans Josef. Die Odyssee des Engelbert Humperdinck, ein biographische Dokumentation. Siegburg, Germany: Druck Schmitt, 1974. This represents the best access to the sources on Humperdinck’s life. In German.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Engelbert Humperdinck: Briefe und Tagebücher. Cologne, Germany: Volk, 1976. Along with Irmen’s other book, this is the best source of information on Humperdinck. In German.

Markow, R. “Humperdinck: Beyond Hansel und Gretel.” Opera News 53, no. 7 (December 24, 1988): 24. Profile of Humperdinck, discussing his personal life, musical training, work for Wagner, the influence of Wagner upon his music, and his operatic works.

Pennino, John. “Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts.” Opera News 66, no. 6 (December, 2001): 45. Recounts Humperdinck’s arrival in New York in December, 1910, for the premiere of his opera Königskinder at the Metropolitan Opera House. Discusses the preparations for his stay, evaluates the performance of famed singer Geraldine Farrar, and compares Königskinder to Hänsel und Gretel.