If you fancy a gingerbread house with your Hänsel und Gretel, head to one of Munich’s many Christmas markets because you won’t find any at the Bayerische Staatsoper. Richard Jones’ well-travelled production – Welsh National Opera, the Met, Chicago Lyric – puts the grim firmly back into this Brothers Grimm fairy tale. It’s a story about hunger and cannibalism after all. When the freed children tuck into the baked corpse of the witch, I was reminded of the old joke where an explorer, encountering a tribe, nervously asks, “Are there any cannibals here?” “No. We ate the last one yesterday.”
Adelheid Wette, Engelbert Humperdinck’s sister, was so horrified at the cruelty in the original story that she ironed much of it out of her libretto. Jones puts the creases back. From the social drama of the shabby 1950s kitchen, where hunger is real and the children’s pill-popping mother considers an overdose, to the witches’ industrial kitchen, the director doesn’t sugar-coat the opera. John Macfarlane’s frontcloths include a Francis Bacon-ish mouth with a giant slurping tongue, eventually featuring the temptation of a tiered chocolate cake.
The central act is wonderfully surreal, a wallpapered room lined with eerie trees dressed in suits and a Sandman – warmly sung by Meg Brilleslyper – as a skeletal old man. But the Pantomime dream sequence, featuring a fish-headed maître d’ and fourteen doughy-faced chefs laying out a huge feast, shows that, among all the grotesquery, Jones can still make room for magic.
Rachael Wilson and Nikola Hillebrand led this revival cast as the titular children. Wilson, who has previously sung the Sandman here, has a robust mezzo which suited the brashness of Hänsel and she has all the gawkiness of an adolescent boy. Hillebrand’s soprano is light and lyrical, its purity apt for the pig-tailed girl, throwing out top notes with insouciant ease. Their voices combined tenderly in the Evening Prayer, which the children in the audience recognised, while the adults choked back their tears.
Vladimir Jurowski tucked into the calorific score with relish, its rich chromaticism distinctly Wagnerian. Not for nothing was the young Humperdinck part of a fan group that called themselves “The Order of the Grail”. He later assisted Wagner on the preliminary work for Parsifal at Bayreuth and the Pantomime sounds like his tribute to the Good Friday Music. Jurowski, a great Wagnerian himself, drew sonorous playing from the brass of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester, while the velvet strings caressed.
When it comes to the Witch, Humperdinck’s Knusperhexe is a close cousin of Wagner’s Mime and Ya-Chung Huang, sporting a black frock and triple chins, threw himself into the role, even if he lacked a touch of the Heldentenor volume required. Thomas Mole made for a gruffly good-natured Father but Julianne Banse’s soprano lacked a little heft as the Mother. Iana Aivazian’s sparky soprano suited the Dew Fairy, here relegated to washing up after the Pantomime feast – Jones’ Fairy Liquid gag? The Children’s Chorus, some of them tiny tots, made their last minute appearance count, singing the final hymn of praise quite beautifully.
Even without the gingerbread house, there’s enough wickedness in Jones’ staging for sweet tooths to savour.
