Königskinder online programme

In the forest, a goose girl lives with a witch. Together, they bake a magical loaf of bread: whoever eats it will die in blissful ecstasy. When the goose girl is alone, she meets the king’s son, who has gone out into the world to learn how to be a good king. They instantly fall in love, but the witch’s influence prevents the goose girl from leaving the forest. Exasperated, the king’s son storms off. Then the minstrel, the woodcutter and the broom maker arrive from nearby Hellastadt to ask the witch who should become their king. The witch replies that whoever comes through the town gate at twelve noon the next day is the right person. The minstrel discovers the goose girl and helps her to put an end to the witch’s influence over her.

In Hellastadt the next day, festivities are held in anticipation of the new ruler. When, at the stroke of twelve, the goose girl comes through the town gate, the king’s son is the only one to recognise her as his queen. The people of Hellastadt feel tricked and drive them away.

Months later, things have changed in the forest: it is the middle of winter and the witch is no longer alive. The goose girl and king’s son arrive at the house dejected and starving. They eat the magical bread and die.

Elsa Bernstein grew up with Wagner and his music. Her father Heinrich Porges (1837-1900) was a music critic and conductor who moved in Wagner’s circles. He was even rumoured to be composer Franz Liszt’s illegitimate son. Porges worked closely with Wagner in Bayreuth and meticulously documented what he saw there. It is thanks, in part, to him that we know so well how Wagner went about directing, and practising for, his performances. Young Elsa started to share her father’s passion for music from an early age: she first visited the Bayreuther Festspiele when she was ten. She instantly became a Wagner fan and would stay closely connected to the “Wagner clan” for the rest of her life.

Elsa did not find out that she was Jewish until she was in her teens. Her parents had raised their children in the Protestant faith, celebrated Christmas and were fully assimilated in German society. Despite being a devout Protestant, she married Max Bernstein, a Jewish lawyer, playwright and theatre critic, at the age of 24. While her husband refused to abandon the Jewish faith, Judaism took a back seat, even in her marriage. At one point, she wrote about her husband that, ‘except for his last name, the Bavarian element had completely replaced the race element’.

The Bernsteins were at the heart of Munich’s cultural circles: in their salon, they welcomed guests such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodor Fontane and Thomas Mann, who met his future wife Katharina there.

Theatre

From a young age, Elsa Bernstein knew that theatre was her calling. Before she turned 17, she started working as an actress, first with the Magdeburger Stadttheater and then, from 1884 to 1887, with the Braunschweiger Hoftheater. Unfortunately, her acting career was cut short by a degenerative eye affliction, which became worse due to the bright stage lighting. She shifted her focus to writing plays, applying her stage experience in the process. But this career change was anything but smooth sailing. The theatre was a man’s world: women were tolerated on stage, but they were generally not accepted as playwrights. It was for this reason that Elsa Bernstein decided to use a male (and gentile) pen name. The name Rosmer is a clear reference to the work of ground-breaking Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, who was taking the international theatre world by storm at the time with his socio-critical, naturalist and psychologically intricate plays. In Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (1886), the name of the male protagonist is Johannes Rosmer. It is safe to say that some of Bernstein’s plays were heavily inspired by Ibsen. Wir Drei (We Three, 1891), for instance, is about a love triangle where the two women are more interested in each other than in the jealous man, Dämmerung (Twilight, 1893) is about the rise and fall of the relationship between a female ophthalmologist and a male artist, and Maria Arndt (1908) is about a woman who has separated from her husband to give her daughter the best possible education and who becomes pregnant by a lover. The social issues we see in Ibsen’s plays, such as the role of women in marriage – powerless, subservient to their husbands, limited in their options for self-determination – and the importance of education (and hence emancipation) for women are also the main themes in these naturalist plays by Bernstein.

Elsa Bernstein, however, did not just write naturalist dramas. She also tried her hand at plays in the style of the classic tragedies, such as Themistokles (1897) about the Athenean politician and general of the same name, Nausikaa(1906) about the young princess who finds Odysseus after his shipwreck and falls in love with him, and Achill (1910) about the Greek hero Achilles and his relationships with slave girl Briseis and his friend Patroclus. What is interesting is that, in these tragedies too, Bernstein highlights perspectives that were significantly less prominent in her source material. In his Odyssey, Homer only touches upon Princess Nausikaa’s infatuation with Odysseus. In Bernstein’s play, however, this is the focal point and the reason for a heated discussion between the princess and her mother about free partner choice and marriage. When Nausikaa finds out that Odysseus’s wife is harassed by a passel of suitors at her home, she decides to tell him, even if this means that she will lose the man she loves. In her neoclassical plays, Bernstein basically does the same as novelist Madeline Miller, who is now making a name for herself with her best-sellers The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018): they both take a deep dive into perspectives that were underexposed in the ancient source texts.

 

Königskinder

Elsa Bernstein wrote Königskinder in the autumn of 1893. This fairy-tale play was a departure from the naturalist dramas she wrote earlier in her career. In Königskinder, she used typical fairy tale elements and incorporated them into a play with artificially sounding, archaic and alliterative turns of phrase. At the same time, the drama has sharp socio-critical edges and realism makes its way into the fairy-tale world. The play was not well-received by all. Siegfried Wagner, Richard’s son, felt that Bernstein’s script was artificial. He described the play as an ‘un-German, cynical fairy tale after the latest fashion’. Königskinder, the play, was published in the autumn of 1894. On 12 December 1894, Heinrich Porges, Elsa’s father, wrote a letter to Engelbert Humperdinck:

I have a special request to make of you. As you may recall, the last time you were in Munich, I told you that my daughter Elsa wrote Königskinder, a German fairy tale, in the autumn of 1893. It was published this past autumn. Theatre director Possart [of the Munich Hoftheater] looked at the play. He is exceptionally excited about it and would like to stage it. My question to you, which I am asking on behalf of Possart, is whether you would be interested in composing music for the play. No one would be better suited to the job than you.

Humperdinck was inspired by Elsa Bernstein’s words and suggested that he should not limit himself to incidental music – the best known example being the incidental music Ludwig van Beethoven composed for a staging of Goethe’s Egmont (1787) in 1810. Humperdinck saw broader opportunities for Bernstein’s script, which he felt was extremely musical. He suggested staging the play as a melodrama and using speak-singing, a vocal technique halfway between singing and speaking. Humperdinck came up with an entirely new form of musical notation for this. Bernstein agreed on the condition that the roles would always be performed by actors rather than singers. Humperdinck had finished his music for the melodrama by the end of 1896: he had composed an orchestral prelude for each act and, of the total of 2,320 lines in the drama, roughly 500 were melodramatic passages.

Königskinder, the melodrama, premiered in Munich on 23 January 1897 and enjoyed a reasonably positive reception. Still, some critics objected to the melodramatic passages. Cosima Wagner, Richard’s widow, was unable to attend the premiere and saw the performance shortly after it premiered. On 28 January 1897, she wrote to the composer. In her letter, she addressed ‘the problem of the spoken music or should I say the sung words? I could not make out very much; the actors were screaming so loudly that I could not hear what they said. I asked myself the entire time: did our friend Humperdinck write pitches for them or not? The constant looking but not finding was hurting my ears.’

In the years after the premiere, the melodrama was performed about 130 times, but Humperdinck only truly satisfied with the performance of Hedwig Schacko, a singer who was the first to perform the role of Gretel (in Hänsel und Gretel)  in Frankfurt. He felt that she was the only artist who was able to navigate the musical challenges of the role. But even this success led to discord between Humperdinck and Bernstein, who wrote an angry letter to Humperdinck:

‘Yesterday afternoon, I received a letter from Stuttgart telling me that the local theatre director had tried to cast a singer in the role of Goose Girl. Miss Schacko’s casting was an exception. I only allowed it because you and Hedwig had assured me that she had unusual dramatic qualities. Now I am hearing everywhere that you are planning to cast singers as soloists in Königskinder. [...] If I had known that my words would be put in the mouths of singers, I would never have written them. I might have even burnt my script.’

Humperdinck consulted with Cosima Wagner, who suggested that he let the issue rest for the time being:

‘I do not think the current success will be permanent. You could ask Frau Bernstein in a while whether she would allow you to turn it into an opera. Your sister could write the libretto […]. You can compose the whole thing after the adaptation; that would leave us with a wonderful counterpart to Hänsel und Gretel!’

It took about ten years, until 1907, for Humperdinck to write Elsa Bernstein a letter suggesting that he turn Königskinder into an opera. Her initial reaction was one of shock‘

'Your letter came as a surprise and I am asking you to give me two days to think about it. I totally understand where you are coming from and I want to give this some serious thought. What I am unclear about is the following: if Königskinder is to be an opera, the script will require drastic and radical cuts. Without cutting scenes, the piece would be much too long for an evening’s performance. You know as well as I do that Königskinder was not meant or written as a libretto. What are your thoughts? Can you tell me more? I hope you understand that I would not want anyone but me to make the changes. If, in my heart, I feel that your arguments outweigh mine, I will give you my permission out of personal affection for you. But please let me know what your ideas are for the new text format.’

One day later, even before she had heard back from Humperdinck, she had made her decision:

‘Because I know that every day counts for you, I have decided not to wait for your answer. I hope we can agree on the small details if I say “yes” to the general idea. So, the answer is "yes”. I will leave everything to you and your artistry on the condition that there will be no additions to the text. Please, absolutely no additions! I know that there is a lot that needs to be cut and I would like to do that in dialogue with you.’

And that is how Königskinder eventually became an opera, despite Elsa Bernstein’s initial reservations.

 

Theresienstadt

Over the years, Elsa Bernstein’s eye condition worsened and she went completely blind. After the death of her husband in 1925, her unmarried sister Gabriele became her companion and caretaker. Bernstein stopped writing plays and her work fell into obscurity in the years after that, partly because of the rise of National-Socialism, which made her and her sister’s lives increasingly difficult. When they were threatened to be evicted in 1937, Winifred Wagner, Richard’s daughter-in-law and staunch supporter (and good friend) of Adolf Hitler, intervened and managed to prevent their eviction at the last minute. In 1941, the sisters saw no other choice but to flee Germany. Elsa Bernstein asked Winifred Wagner to secure exit visas for the United States via Switzerland for her and her sister. Hers was awarded, but Gabriele’s was not. Elsa decided to stay in Germany. This is what she wrote to a friend:

‘I cannot be separated from her. Leaving her would be a betrayal. Betrayal is an act of inhumanity.’

On 26 June 1942, the sisters were deported to Theresienstadt, where Gabriele Porges died of an intestinal infection within a month. Thanks to Winifred Wagner intervening, Elsa Bernstein was placed on the list of “prominent” prisoners. She was moved from the barracks to the “Prominentenhaus”, was exempted from labour, was kept off the deportation list (to extermination camp Auschwitz) and enjoyed privileges, including the right to correspond with the outside world. After her liberation, Bernstein used a special typewriter for the blind to write her memoirs. The typescript was published in German in 1999, long after her death, under the title Das Leben als Drama: Erinnerungen an Theresienstadt (Life as a Drama: Memories of Theresienstadt).

The memoirs give a detailed account of her everyday life in Theresienstadt, the “model concentration camp” that was presented in Nazi propaganda as a paradise-like retirement settlement. Representatives of the Red Cross who visited the camp to inspect the living conditions did not notice anything amiss. In 1944, the Nazis even shot a propaganda film in the camp entitled Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area). The film shows people playing sports or shopping in the camp. After the film had been shot, director Kurt Gerron and the persons who appeared in the film were deported to Auschwitz and sent to the gas chambers.

The memoirs not only show what the daily life of a “prominent” in the camp was like, but they also paint a picture of a woman who felt disillusioned: Bernstein was unable to identify with the non-assimilated Jews in Theresienstadt. She saw herself as German first and foremost. It was hard for her to stomach that she had been “betrayed” by her own culture. It is unclear why she wrote her memoirs. At any rate, she never tried to get them published: they were discovered by accident in the attic of one of her descendants in 1994. Until her death in 1949, Elsa Bernstein continued to be a staunch believer in the Germany of Goethe and Wagner in which she had felt so at home.

 

Author: Laura Roling

Klaus Bertisch: Why is Königskinder so little known as an opera when compared with Hänsel und Gretel, Engelbert Humperdinck’s great success? Surely Königskinder is the better work?

Christof Loy: The initial reception of Königskinder suffered from the fact that his first opera Hänsel und Gretel had been a triumph and was followed by a long period without any new operas. When Königskinder finally premiered more than ten years later, people were expecting a second Hänsel und Gretel: the bar was set pretty high after that first success. Humperdinck didn’t make it easy for himself either by once again choosing material from the realm of fairy tales. The story of Königskinder is not taken from some existing, familiar collection of fairy tales; it was conceived from scratch and the plot in particular is rather dark and not necessarily optimistic. It is diametrically opposed to the positive conclusion drawn at the end of Hänsel und Gretel with the lines “Wenn die Not aufs Höchste steigt, Gott der Herr die Hand uns reicht” (‘When our need is greatest, God extends a helping hand’). You could even call Königskinder a kind of counterweight to Hänsel und Gretel. There is no God here anymore, no religion.

KB: In that sense, Königskinder is a much more modern work. In the second act, we even encounter a society that is truly godless.

CL: The name ‘Hellastadt’, the setting for the second act, is probably derived from ‘hell’. It is a place that is driven by material concerns, not human salvation. It has no priest or church, but above all it has no values or ideals. It stands in sharp contrast to the royal children — the Königskinder — as they represent something quite different. In that sense, there is a religious aspect to this opera after all. After the Goose Girl has learned of her true origins from the Witch, she calls on her parents in a prayer to help her love with the same pure faith as they once did. The King’s Son is an impassioned dreamer, an idealist who wants to be a good king and keeps trying right up to the end. As early as the first act, he already discards his crown. It is entirely credible in his case that he seeks to do the right thing.

KB: Does the opera show us a dichotomy between good and evil, for instance in the contrast between the forest and the town? Or should we be cautious about drawing such conclusions?

CL: It’s true that the town represents degeneracy rather more. We are wrong-footed initially as we encounter a witch in the first act who is presented as a not particularly sympathetic character. It’s only later, when we get to know the people of Hellastadt, that we realise this woman should be interpreted positively and that she was right to act as she did. She had good reason for foreswearing humankind. Humperdinck and his librettist Elsa Bernstein-Porges also play with our preconceptions. The Witch is a woman who has manoeuvred herself onto the sidelines, and has perhaps also become rather capricious, stubborn and idiosyncratic over time. The word witch should really be placed in inverted commas: she speaks the truth, even if her spirituality, with its spells and curses, is wasted on the inhabitants of Hellastadt. The Goose Girl, however, believes in the good in people. She is altruistic to a fault. She is also quite a modern character, trying until deep into the third act to help her lover get over his depression. They are two young people who had plans for their lives, but they are doomed to fail: they are from different ranks in society, so they are not accepted as a couple. The King’s Son wanted to be a good king and lead the nation to a new golden age. He has never been interested in power. His tragedy is that he does not even manage to guide the only person he truly loves through life. In contrast, the Goose Girl is a strong person. At the end, when she recognises the poisonous loaf cursed by the Witch, she knows they will both die if they eat it but she still shares the bread with the King’s Son because she wants to see him happy one last time.

KB: Is this a deliberate turn towards death?

CL: By bringing the King’s Son into a state of euphoria, the Goose Girl commits one last act of mercy, even though she knows this also means they will die.

KB: Any discussion of the characters would not be complete without mentioning the Minstrel.

CL: Indeed. The opera has four lead roles, all of whom are or become outsiders. First there is the Witch, whose sphere of influence encompasses the Goose Girl, an orphan with a horrific family history: her deceased parents were the executioner’s assistant and the executioner’s daughter. As a result, the Goose Girl is stigmatised from the start. She needs to learn first that you can still have an inner nobility despite such a background. It is the Minstrel who succeeds in making that clear to her.

KB: The Goose Girl’s parents met almost the same fate as their daughter. They too were deprived of a future together and destined to die after one night of unconditional love. They too showed courage up until the moment of death.

CL: The Minstrel is introduced as a kind of outlaw. He has no rights in the town and does not claim any either. Society tolerates him at best. He refuses to comply with certain rules of behaviour, which gives him a sense of freedom. He is the only inhabitant of Hellastadt who is on good terms with the Witch, because she accepts him for the oddball he is. So in fact he is already an outsider at the start and, in the course of the opera, his position becomes increasingly marginal. The townsfolk adopt mob rule, with the Minstrel as the victim. They feel betrayed by him because they did not get the royal couple they had been expecting. It is like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, where people only see the hat but not the elephant wearing the hat. In this opera, only the children can recognise true nobility and see that the Goose Girl and the King’s Son are indeed royalty. They are clairvoyant, whereas the adults are blind. The children trust their instincts much more. And as a group, the adults exhibit a degree of stupidity that becomes ever more dangerous. A hysterical aggression takes hold of them, a pogrom mindset that makes them turn on the young couple, and eventually the Minstrel and the Witch too. Between the second and third acts, the Minstrel and the Witch are put on trial by the townsfolk.

KB: You use film to describe the events that take place between the second and third acts, which Humperdinck and his librettist Elsa Bernstein-Porges chose not to show on stage. How important do you see this for understanding the opera as a whole?

CL: In the opera, just a couple of short sentences at the start of the third act tell you what happened. The people of Hellastadt took revenge because they believed they had been deceived by a false prophecy. They tried the Witch and condemned her to be burnt at the stake. They also broke the leg of the Minstrel, who they saw as the Witch’s accomplice, and left him to fend for himself as a cripple. I felt it was important to show how cruel the people of Hellastadt are. It prepares you for the inexpressible misery of the royal children, because they too are victims of this system. The film highlights this extreme behaviour.

KB: This shows the prescience of the librettist Elsa Bernstein-Porges. At the end of the nineteenth century, she wrote a text that anticipates what would happen in Germany.

CL: She wrote a play in which a witch is burned at the stake, then in the early 1940s she herself was transported to Theresienstadt along with her sister. Elsa survived, but her sister died in the concentration camp.

            Even though the opera takes place in a fantasy world, I felt it was important to situate the events around the period of the opera’s premiere in 1910. That was a time when the world was undergoing radical change, setting developments in motion that would have a comprehensive, negative impact. The opera warns of the danger of giving people too much power, especially when that power is exercised so primitively that unadulterated egotism can run rampant. The Woodcutter and the Broom-maker are the people’s representatives in this work; they manipulate the townsfolk and hate everything that does not fit with their worldview.

KB: In the second act, the Woodcutter gives a speech that we would now term populist. He gives a hyperbolic account of what he claims he experienced, rabble-rousing and working up the crowd to feel fear for something that did not actually happen.

CL: And at the end of the opera, the Broom-maker refuses to give the royal children shelter, just as later Jews were often turned away at the door with the message “We have nothing for rent”.

KB: Are we doing the opera an injustice if we pigeonhole it as a fairy tale?

CL: That depends on how you interpret fairy tales. If you take Hänsel und Gretel, the most interesting productions are the ones that delve into the deeper layers. Anyone who reads Königskinder carefully cannot avoid arriving at a certain interpretation.

            I would say the town’s children are the fifth lead role in the opera. There are clear similarities between the protest by the children of Hellastadt and current events such as the ‘Fridays for Future’ (the school strikes by pupils, with Greta Thunberg as the most famous exponent). In 1910 too, children fought for a different world to the one their parents lived in. They failed because they were unable to put their ideals into practice. I also felt it was important to depict a possible development in various phases of life on the stage. What would it have been like to meet these children twenty years later? You see everything come round again and in the end you have to conclude nothing really changes.

KB: As so often in your productions, you use dancers for an extra dimension. What do you think that adds?

CL: There can be something almost childlike in dancing, so I see the dancers as a bridge between the child singers and the adult singers. They represent something as yet unused, something hopeful. I also wanted to show that children are not invariably the ‘good guys’; they may also quarrel or hate one another. Young people have to deal with what they were taught as children. Do they take a particular stance because that is what they feel deep down inside or because that was what they were told to think? The dance also raises questions of whether we can hold on to that childlike aspect in adulthood, and questions about the complexity of social structures and time. Considering the past lets you open your eyes to the present and renders you better able to see what the past means for the future.

KB: Does that mean this opera should be performed more often?

CL: If people are moved by an opera and get something from it, then performances are always worthwhile. At the end, the Minstrel is a broken man because he can no longer function as a musician. He cannot use his artistry to tell people about joy and hope. But it is important that he passes on his task to a new generation.

 

Text: Klaus Bertisch

Translation from the German: Laura Roling

How did the decision to do Königskinder come about?

Christof Loy and I know each other very well and have collaborated for years. In particular, we have built up something of a tradition of doing forgotten operas. In fact, we have a joint wish list of neglected works we would like to put under the spotlight again. Königskinder was suggested by Christof and it is a work that I believe definitely deserves a permanent place in opera houses’ repertoires. When Sophie de Lint asked me what I would like to conduct for my Amsterdam ‘comeback’, I knew the answer immediately. During my time as chief conductor, I performed a lot of Romantic and late Romantic operas with the orchestra. Now we are building on that foundation, and adding a new member to the ‘family’, as it were.

At the start of his career, Humperdinck worked closely with Richard Wagner. What effect did that have on him and his work?

Wagner had a huge influence on Humperdinck, to an almost paralysing extent. Just after Humperdinck had graduated, he travelled to Naples and turned up at the villa where Wagner was staying, presenting a calling card with his name and the words ‘Member of the Order of the Grail’. This was followed by a role as an assistant in the preparations for Parsifal, in what became a close working relationship and friendship. Humperdinck became Wagner’s son Siegfried’s music tutor, but Wagner also tended to keep his protégé under his thumb, affectionately calling him ‘Hümpchen’. Humperdinck’s main task was copying the original manuscript of Parsifal. I think it must affect you if you are given a task like that. Of course it was a boon to be able to work so closely with Wagner but it was also a great burden — almost too great. Humperdinck barely composed anything in the first few years after Wagner’s death. That paralysis is also evident in the history of the origins of Hänsel und Gretel: the work started out as a play with songs, written at the instigation of his sister, then it became a Singspiel, and only then did it develop into an opera. That origin story suggests a hesitant, uncertain person.

Can we hear many Wagnerian influences in Königskinder?

Wagner is definitely an influence, not only in the sound but also in the structure. Königskinder contains several clear references to Die Meistersinger, for example, such as to the Festwiese, the festival ground, in the second act. But equally, you can see Humperdinck finding his own style. For example, he uses the orchestra in a way that is essentially akin to chamber music. He creates a lot of room for delicate string solos, which you would never find in Wagner.

            What is more, he experiments with incorporating folksongs and lieder as elements in his style. The Minstrel’s music has very strong Schubertian influences, especially in the third act. At the start of act three, the Minstrel sings a song (‘Meine grauen Täublein’) that is reminiscent of ‘Der Leiermann’ in Der Winterreise, with the same harmonies and the same rhythm repeated again and again. It creates a hollow, monotonous feeling, of something that has been abandoned or become frozen. The same applies to the song he sings just before he sets off with the children in search of the royal children (‘Wohin bist du gegangen, O Königstochter mein’). The key is A flat major, with an upward melodic sixth — a clear reference to Schubert. And the strings are the only accompaniment here, which is also unthinkable in Wagner.

            Interestingly, Humperdinck’s music has a dancing swing in its step at times, not only in the large scene with all the festivities but also when the Minstrel makes his first appearance, with a song in a 6/8 rhythm. In that regard too, we are a long way from Wagnerian influences.

Königskinder was originally not an opera at all but a melodrama, with passages of Sprechgesang. In that regard, Humperdinck was quite pioneering.

Absolutely. Even before Schönberg was exploring compositions halfway between song and speech in his Gurre-Lieder or Pierrot lunaire, there was Humperdinck the avant-gardist — totally unexpected! For that version of Königskinder, he developed his own, very successful solution for the tricky musical notation of Sprechgesang. The actors need to be highly musical to follow his detailed instructions regarding the rhythm and pitch.

How are the characters in Königskinder defined musically?

The King’s Son has contrasting sides. On the one hand, there is the call of the horn that opens the opera. That is his theme and it immediately conveys his curiosity, energy and impatience. On the other hand, he has an exceptional, lyrical sensitivity, which we hear in his first scene with the Goose Girl. His singing there is delicate, seductive and fragile. So he encompasses two extremes, which makes him perhaps the most interesting character musically. Along with the Minstrel, who I sometimes feel is the real central character of the opera. He is the imposing singer who sets the tone in the climax to the third act with his ‘Letzter Gesang’.

            With the Goose Girl, you hear a certain naivety and warmth, which is retained throughout the opera. She remains true to herself even though the world around her changes. You can tell here how much Humperdinck has learned from his experience with Parsifal. Diatonic and chromatic intervals are used here as well to delineate various irreconcilable worlds. The Goose Girl is very much a diatonic character. She is clear-cut: pure, simple and warm. The King’s Son on the other hand undergoes a process of development musically. Like the title character in Parsifal, he is sorely tested and in danger of losing his way.

            The Witch also forms a sharp contrast with the Goose Girl. She has been through a great deal in her life and experienced a lot of pain. In her scenes with the Goose Girl, she is very much the chromatic character — seasoned, tough and dominant, although she also has a loving, grandmotherly side to her in our production.

After eating the cursed loaf, the royal children die together in an ecstatic delirium. Can we see links here with the ‘Liebestod’ in Tristan und Isolde?

There are more similarities to the first act, when Tristan and Isolde drink the love potion. They are under the misapprehension that it is a death potion. Isolde makes sure that Tristan does not drink it all but leaves some for her, as she wants to die together with him. The situation is slightly different in Königskinder, as only the Goose Girl knows that the bread is lethal and she keeps that information to herself. She insists that he eat the other half because she wants to see him happy one last time. As in Tristan und Isolde, eating the bread releases an enormous burst of energy and euphoria. In a final surge of happiness, the lovers experience all that they were deprived of in their lives.

            However, musically there is also a big difference with Wagner’s opera: when the bread is baked in the first act and when it reappears in the third act, it is accompanied by a stillness, with sober, bewitching chords — not at all like the grandeur of Tristan.

            In Königskinder, and especially in the third act, I see a composer who has finally found himself and managed to emerge from the shadow of his master. Wagner’s copyist was eventually able to produce an opera that is far from being a mere copy.

 

Text: Laura Roling