Engelbert Humperdinck:The Musical Storyteller

Engelbert Humperdinck, world-famous as a composer during his lifetime, is best known today for one opera:"Hansel and Gretel". The late romantic died 100 years ago in Neustrelitz.

At almost 40 years of age, he had the big hit:The fairy tale opera "Hänsel und Gretel", premiered in Weimar in 1893, made the composer Engelbert Humperdinck suddenly famous. "Truly, it is a first-rate masterpiece!" Richard Strauss, who conducted the premiere, is said to have rejoiced:"What a flourishing invention, what magnificent polyphony - and everything is original, new and so genuinely German!" To this day, the opera is one of the most-performed pieces of music theater and is on the program in many houses every year during the Christmas season.

From underpaid music teacher to millionaire

The blockbuster "Hansel and Gretel" brought Humperdinck a number of other engagements and made him - after years of artistic and financial dry spells - a millionaire.

He had already shown musical talent as a child. Humperdinck was born on September 1, 1854 in Siegburg, the son of a high school teacher. His mother especially supported him and performed the compositions of the young Engelbert together with his sisters. Most of Humperdinck's early works were later lost in an attic fire. Among other things, a wedding march that he wrote in 1871 on the occasion of his uncle's marriage has survived.

Academic Years and Scholarships

After graduating from high school in Paderborn, the young Humperdinck pursued his desire to study singing and composition. He passed the entrance exam at the Cologne Conservatory. At first he had to work part-time to make a living, but with diligence and talent he won several scholarships. With the Frankfurt Mozart Prize in his pocket, he moved to the Munich Conservatory in 1877. Here the student joined the "Order of the Grail", a kind of Richard Wagner fan club. Humperdinck was fascinated by Wagner, the music theater innovator, and raved about his works.

Collaboration with Richard Wagner

When he won the Berlin Mendelssohn Prize in 1879, Humperdinck traveled to Italy with the money. In Naples he sought out his idol, spoke at his door and, being identified as a "member of the Order of the Grail", actually gained admission. Richard Wagner hired his admirer as an assistant in Bayreuth. He was to support the preparatory work for the premiere of "Parsifal" - a step with far-reaching consequences for the 28-year-old.

Because the rehearsals showed that the metamorphosis music in the first act of "Parsifal" was too short to allow the scene reconstruction intended by Wagner. Engelbert Humperdinck was allowed to compose a small extension in the Wagner style. The fact that the master personally recognized these two pages of the score and actually had them played was the highest possible award for Humperdinck and meant more to him than all previous composition awards.

Artistic crisis and restless years

The hole into which the up-and-coming tone poet fell after Wagner's death in the following year was all the deeper. He traveled a lot and composed little, for years he could not really gain a foothold anywhere. His path led through Western Europe all the way to Africa. Employments such as theater conductor in Cologne, music professor in Barcelona or even musical associate of the industrialist Alfred Krupp did not last long. Some things did not satisfy him artistically, in other places he was not well liked as a "Wagnerian". He kept his head above water by working as a lecturer or music teacher - for example for Wagner's son Siegfried - as an editor at a music publisher in Mainz, with music reviews for newspapers and occasional commissioned works.

The turning point:fairytale game project "Hansel and Gretel"

Humperdinck only gained momentum when his sister Adelheid approached him in 1890 with the "Hansel and Gretel" project. Together with her husband, the doctor Herrmann Wette, she had adapted the popular story into a fairytale play for children and wanted her brother to provide the music for her libretto. The end product, performed in the family circle, delighted everyone, so Engelbert set about turning it into a full-length opera. Well-known folk songs and new song compositions such as "Brüderchen, komm tanz mit mir" (little brother, come dance with me) meld melodically into a complete work, a monumental Wagnerian orchestra tells the children's story in rich tones. The success of the premiere was sensational. Soon more than 50 stages were playing the fairy tale opera all over the country.

Happy time in Boppard am Rhein

Engelbert Humperdinck was able to buy his young family a beautiful villa from the royalties in 1897 in Boppard, high above the Rhine - the so-called Humperdinck Castle. In 1892, while he was working on the fairy tale, he married the evangelical bookseller's daughter Hedwig Taxer, and his son Wolfram and two daughters were already born. The couple had five children in total and had a happy marriage.

Productive creative period

Inspired by the worldwide success of "Hansel and Gretel", Humperdinck devoted himself to composing. He did well in business, creating numerous works of different genres, including songs and chamber music works. His incidental music for the fairy tale play "Königskinder" (1897) by Ernst Rosmer alias Elsa Bernstein attracted a great deal of attention:he developed a new form specifically for this material, the "bound melodrama" as "the most intimate connection between music and language". It required the actors to chant, for which Humperdinck invented his own notation, which, however, did not catch on. Years later, Humperdinck reworked the piece into a full opera, and it had its brilliant premiere in 1910 at the New York Metropolitan Opera.

Humpderdinck in the north:Berlin and Usedom

Humperdinck kept the "little castle" as his summer residence when he was appointed to the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin at the end of 1900. During his time in Berlin, he created several incidental music for productions under Max Reinhardt, especially for Shakespeare dramas. For the work on the drama "Storm" he and his wife stayed in Heringsdorf in 1906, in the villa "Meeresstern" on the Kulm hill, which is still preserved today, in order to gather impressions of the wind and rough sea.

However, he was no longer granted lasting applause - neither with the fairy tale operas "The Seven Little Geiss" (1895) or "Sleeping Beauty" (1902), nor with the comic opera "The Marriage Against Will" (1905), which was so dear to his heart lay, or with his late comedy "Die Sutretenderin" (1914) and "Gaudeamus" (1919).

Son Wolfram follows in the musical footsteps

In 1911 he suffered his first stroke and was in poor health from then on. The death of his wife five years later hit him hard. In 1920 Humperdinck retired. His heart was in the Rhineland, but he didn't come back:During a visit to Neustrelitz, where his son Wolfram Weber's "Freischütz" was being staged, he suffered another stroke. The next day, on September 27, 1921, Engelbert Humperdinck died. The composer received an honorary grave of the city of Berlin on the Südwestkirchhof in Stahnsdorf.

Aftermath and Rediscovery

Recently, Humperdinck's work between romanticism and modernity, apart from fairy tales and folk songs, has been rediscovered. "Remembrance", a musical notation from his sister Ernestine's poetry album, is the second oldest surviving work by Engelbert Humperdinck. Hinrich Alpers has freshly recorded the little piano piece:a light, sweet melody - less Wagner, more Mozart.

And another person discovered the German composer for himself - but he was particularly fascinated by the bizarre-sounding name:Pop singer Arnold Dorsey made a worldwide career in the 1970s under the pseudonym Engelbert Humperdinck. In Germany, the Schlagerbarden is known as Engelbert.