Some nights at the opera leave you breathless, radiant, alive. Some nights just leave you. Why does Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 Germanic strudel of a fairy-tale opera Hansel and Gretel feel as heavy as the Hindenberg?
It can’t be the music – at times lush and heavily orchestrated, at others light and airy as a lullaby, or folk-inspired as if wielding a brautwurst and a pilsner. The singing, No – you won’t hear a more definitive and heavenly Gretel than soprano Mané Galoyan. Listen to her “Ti-re-li-re-lis” in her rhapsodic awakening aria in the forest – bright, clean, defined – or the strength of her high notes everywhere. She’s a delight to hear.
A more robust Hansel than mezzo Sacha Cooke would be hard to beat. She matches Galoyan in characterization, and they blend voices to perfection. And the Witch, a.k.a. Rosina Sweet Tooth, portrayed by HGO fan-favorite mezzo Jamie Barton, eats up the scenery like marzipan. She’s sly, wicked and funny. The orchestra under debut maestro Andreas Ottensamer sounded sweet, tempestuous, or brassy as Humperdinck asked, and the children’s chorus, under the direction of veteran Karen Reeves, was dulcet-toned personified.
Maybe the sets? No, not quite. During the overture, the show curtain was a pastoral Heidi-scape of fields, Alps, and rustic house and barn nestled in a valley. When the stage lights went up, there, behind the scrim, was a pantomime of the family inside the small hut eating a hearty dinner. Above on the proscenium was a cuckoo clock. Nice touch that. When the lights came up again, there was less food, the cupboards were bare, and the portions for dinner were scant. A quick, insightful way of showing the family’s poverty and hunger.
That’s the director’s touch, Antony McDonald, who also designed the sets and costumes. Mother and Father (soprano Alexandra Loutsion and baritone Reginald Smith, Jr. of the plummy deep voice) are desperate and at wit’s end. While Father is off to town in hopes of selling his brooms, Mother sends the bothersome children off into the woods to gather berries for dinner.
In twilight or dawn, subtly conjured by designer Lucy Carter, the enchanted forest (aren’t all woods enchanted in fairy tales?) looked as realistic as if repurposed from a production of Wagner’s Siegfried. Giant dead tree trunks lay across the front while the forest upstage was shrouded in mist and impressionism. It looked grand until the witch’s house appeared and moved ominously to the foreground.
Isn’t her house supposed to be a confection of sweets and gingerbread? Edible? Nibble-able? The kids sing about its raisin-strewn gables, gingerbread fence, and spun-suger window panes. Not here. This Victorian house is straight out of Psycho, with a huge knife sticking into its roof, albeit topped by a merachino cherry. There are small gingerbread men in the bargework – a spiffy design touch – but the rest is downright eerie. This house doesn’t tempt, it horrifies, and the kids should bolt off stage immediately. But they chow down on the balusters and lick the front steps that look like they’re covered in molten chocolate. That design works.
The gothic grimmest of the Brothers Grimm peeks through occasionally – the force-feeding of Hansel by a contraption out of a medieval dungeon is creepy – but it counteracts the lushness of Humperdink’s music throughout. The witch’s ride, all too short, isn’t scary music so much as pounding and rhythmic. The scene is augmented by a trio of broomstick-wielding witch dancers in pointy hats and black capes who gyrate about the stage in Lucy Burge’s choreography. This doesn’t help the mood.
The tone is off. The music says one thing, while the characters react against it. The forest scene is populated by a Will-o’-the wisp (HGO dancer Silken Kelly) in wind-torn tutu, the Sandman (mezzo Megan Mikailovna), later the Dew Fairy (soprano Alissa Goretsky), a wolf in hunter’s mufti toting an axe, an old man in a sparkly velvet waistcoat who spies on the children from behind the trees, a stag with rifle, and then a panoply of Grimm’s charcters: Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Prince, Rapunzel, Snow White (all played by the HGO Corps Dancers). All this while a lacquered beetle prowls over the proscenium, a giant moth climbs up one side, and a bat hangs upside down. Let’s pick a style and stick to it.
We soon realize that the grumpy old guy is Rumpelstiltskin when he hauls a cart laden with golden straw; the wolf is stalking Red Riding Hood, but the stag with the gun is a mystery. Rapunzel lends her shorn hair as the children’s mattress, Red Riding Hood lays her cloak over them as a blanket, while Cinderella and her Prince do nothing. In a comedy bit, The Prince offers Red Riding Hood then Snow White the glass slipper, which doesn’t fit of course, but Rumpelstiltskin also offers his foot.
Humperdinck specified a ballet for angels in the forest scene, so it’s not such a stretch to add some iconic Grimm characters. But still they seem slightly out of place, even if this is the children’s dream and the angels are now represented by paper cut-outs.
Humperdinck was a protege of Wagner’s, and the Great One’s influence is overwhelming. You can hear faint snippets – bass thumps like the giants in the Ring or celestial strings á la Lohengrin. He could never break free from the master’s spell, however, and none of his subsequent operas have entered the standard repertoire. But he left us with this masterpiece, and this one-off is enough. Musically it is rich with texture and melody, the story is universal, and he gave his lead characters much to chew on.
By HGO’s reckoning, this is its 16th production of Hansel and Gretel since 1966. It’s not definitive, but if you’re looking for an opera to inaugurate the young ones, you couldn’t do any better. Then again, there’s always Galoyan, Cooke, and Barton who cast their own spell. You’ll eat them up.
Hansel and Gretel continues through 2 p.m. Sundays, February 1 and February 15; 7:30 p.m. Saturday, February 7 and Friday, February 13 at Houston Grand Opera, Wortham Theater Center, 501Texas. For more information, call 713-228-6737 or visit [houstongrandopera.org. $31-$299.50.