Hansel und Gretel
Glyndebourne
La bohème
Royal Opera House
The two operas I saw last week were premièred just over two years apart, Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel at Christmas 1893, Puccini’s La Bohème in February 1896. Both of them deal with deprivation and poverty and very different life-destroying forces, and ways of coping with them. They each, of course, stand as squarely as possible in their respective national operatic traditions. One wouldn’t want to press parallels or dissimilarities too far, but when I realised how close they are in time yet what utterly different worlds they evoke it gave me pause.
Partly it’s a matter of Hansel being so wholly indebted to Wagner. I doubt whether there is another work which is so derivative from a previous artist but still so wonderful, as if it’s the opera that Wagner didn’t get round to writing (and never would have).
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