Alemania
Gingerbread Nightmare
Jesse Simon
Perhaps the most overtly festive thing about Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel comes in the final act when the Knusperhexe describes the materials used to build her house, an inventory of almonds, raisins, marzipan and gingerbread that is, for a Christmastime audience, basically just a list of everything we’ve eaten in the past twenty-four hours. Yet despite its un-Christmassy setting, the opera has become, in Germany at least, a staple of the holiday season and a reliable seat-filler to be wheeled out each December along with Die Zauberflöte and La Bohème.
The Staatsoper Berlin, whose newly refurbished house on Unter den Linden enjoyed a week of re-opening celebrations in October before closing again for another two months of finishing touches, returned at last to active service with a wonderfully odd new production of Humperdinck’s chestnut that, while undoubtedly timed to capitalise on the impending holidays, succeeded remarkably well as a work of dark imagination. Directed by Achim Freyer, the production avoided the opera’s saccharine tendencies, instead offering a direct line to the primal terrors that many adults may still remember from childhood. Its grotesqueries were balanced by a light touch and a level of stylisation that kept everything just unreal enough. It was, in short, an exemplary fairy-tale, unsanitised and slightly unhinged. The parents who end up seeing it over the holidays may find themselves enjoying it as much as their children.
One of the central challenges facing any director of Hänsel und Gretel is the task of transforming two adult singers into vaguely credible children. Mr Freyer’s solution was essentially no more than a trick of forced perspective: he dressed the singers in oversized costumes, topped with ridiculously large head masks constructed of a mesh material that allowed the voices to emerge clearly. It should have looked silly, but it worked. With their soft features and large eyes – the eyes, which could be controlled by the singers, were the only part of the masks that moved – the two children looked as though they may have come from the same gene pool as Casper the Friendly Ghost, but their frozen expressions, especially Hänsel’s perma-grin which seemed to grow stranger as the evening progressed, presented a guileless innocence that never deserted them even as their situation became more desperate.
Humperdinck's 'Haensel and Gretel'. Achim Freyer, director. Sebastian Weigle, conductor. Berlin, Staatsoper, December 2017 © Monika Rittershaus, 2017
The relative sweetness of the title characters provided a point of entry into what was otherwise a world of nightmares. Even in the safety of home, things weren’t entirely normal: Peter the father looked like a member of a Bavarian KISS tribute band, and Gertrud the mother, with her severe red hair and starched hoop dress somewhat resembled a strawberry. The house also featured an oversized cat and a personification of hunger which took the form of a giant chef with fork and spoon for arms and a giant void where it’s stomach should have been. Things only grew stranger as Hänsel and Gretel ventured deeper into the forest, encountering a menagerie of the bizarre, including a rat-like creature with piercing red LED eyes, and a rabbit with boxing gloves and a tutu. Yet even these creatures paled next to the Knusperhexe, a misshapen creature with sweets for eyes, a beckoning finger as a beak, two sausages for lips and a coffee-cup top-hat; it was simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, the kind of creature that provoked numerous giggles but might also induce a few nightmares.
With such an inspired assortment of characters, there was little need for elaborate sets. The stage mostly just enhanced the slightly unreal scale of the production by exaggerating the perspective. Despite being decorated with crude crayon lines and tiny lights, it ended up serving as mostly a neutral space for the action and, in the third act, a surface on which subtle video elements could be projected. Mr Freyer seemed content to sketch the characters with broad strokes: Peter lumbered through the set with an exaggerated gait, and Gertrud mostly held her arms aloft in wooden anguish; only the children were allowed a more natural freedom of movement. The exaggerated pantomime action seemed geared more toward the children in the audience than the adults, but then one doesn’t go to Hänsel und Gretel for psychological realism.
Katrin Wundsam and Elsa Dreisig in Humperdinck's 'Haensel and Gretel'. Achim Freyer, director. Sebastian Weigle, conductor. Berlin, Staatsoper, December 2017 © Monika Rittershaus, 2017
As the titular children, Katrin Wundsam (Hänsel) and Elsa Dreisig (Gretel) had the unenviable task of having to perform their roles wearing oversized heads, although both managed to convey a sense of character through stylised physical movement, despite the unchanging expressions of their masks. Ms Dreisig, whose tone was delicate but substantial, was thoroughly delightful throughout the evening, bringing a lilt to the nonsense syllables and naive melodies, but equally at home in the more florid passages (notably the scene where she wakes up her brother at the opening of the third act). Ms Wundsam was appropriately deeper of tone but had a similarly pleasing lightness to her delivery. When singing together – as they did in the description of the gingerbread house – they projected an effortless, agreeable charm.
Roman Trekel and Marina Prudenskaya, both familiar faces on the Staatsoper stage, were all but unrecognisable in their costumes, but both delivered fine performances with varying degrees of parental authority. Mr Trekel’s Peter, with his crisp tone and easy manner, was the more good-natured; Ms Prudenskaya used her imposing voice to give Gertrud a convincing severity that transcended her intentionally stilted, mock dramatic movements. As the Knusperhexe, Stephan Rügamer’s high tenor edged back and forth between amusingly overwrought and genuinely sinister; he kept the cackling to a minimum and delivered his magic spells with a playfulness that stopped just short of ridiculous.
Roman Trekel and Marina Prudenskaya in Humperdinck's 'Haensel and Gretel'. Achim Freyer, director. Sebastian Weigle, conductor. Berlin, Staatsoper, December 2017 © Monika Rittershaus, 2017
Sebastian Weigle, who last guided the forces of the Staatsoper through the altogether darker folk-tale of Der Freischütz, presided over the music with a carefully allotted energy. The cumulative weight of nineteenth century romanticism – and the inescapable influence of Wagner – was often audible but rarely overplayed, and even Humperdinck’s simplest melodies were treated as part of a something more complex. It may be that the score requires larger, more obvious gestures to succeed as a Christmastime entertainment, but Mr Weigle’s intellectual, subtly-sculpted reading was both satisfying on its own and provided a perfect foil to Mr Freyer’s flights of imagination.
If Mr Freyer’s production is a hit with the kids – and one suspects it probably will be – it will be because it offers a clear realisation of a familiar story told with a lightness of touch and enough stage magic to keep the audience dazzled; this alone may be sufficient to ensure its status as an off-kilter classic of holiday entertainment. Yet there was a captivating strangeness to Mr Freyer’s vision; while the opera must inevitably come to rest at a happy ending, there was enough darkness along the way to make this Hänsel und Gretel a pleasingly unsettling journey.
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