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Updated: May 22, 2025
A tiny window beside the door in the background, shows a glimpse of the forest beyond. Hansel and Gretel are at work, he making brooms, she knitting. Gretel sings an old German folk-song, beginning thus: All the melodies in this act have a strong family resemblance, but this song, a cradle song of the long ago, is the only one not composed by Humperdinck.
Engelbert Humperdinck, the latest star in the German musical firmament, was born, Sept. 1, 1854, at Siegburg on the Rhine, and received his earliest musical training at the Cologne Conservatory. He made such rapid progress in his studies, showing special proficiency in composition, that he carried off in succession the three prizes of the Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Meyerbeer stipends.
They stand for dramatic ideas and agencies, and when these are passed in review, as it is purposed shall be done presently, it will be found that not the sinister but the amiable features of the story have been chosen for celebration in the overture. Here, too, in what may be called the ethical meaning of the prelude, Humperdinck has followed the example of Wagner in the prelude to his comedy.
Eugene d'Albert, though English by birth, has for so long identified himself with Germany, that the success of his comic opera, 'Die Abreise' , may most suitably be recorded here. His more ambitious works have been less favourably received. Siegfried Wagner, in spite of his parentage, seems to have founded his style principally upon that of Humperdinck.
Cleverness is his predominating vice, and a marked predilection for time-serving; that is, he, like the excellent musical journalist that he is, feels the public pulse, spreads his sails to the breeze of popular favour, and while he is never as banal as Humperdinck or Leoncavallo, he exhibits this quality in suffusion. Above all, he is not original.
Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Humperdinck, Goldmark, Richard Strauss, Paderewski, and all the others have followed in Wagner's footsteps. Such, briefly told, is the story of Richard Wagner and Modern Music. The "music of the future" has become the music of the present. What the future will bring no one can tell. Croakers say, as they have always said, that the race of giants has died out.
Things of beauty that will be a joy forever have been created by men of genius now living in Europe; such men as the Norwegian Grieg, the Bohemian Dvorák, the French Saint-Saëns and Massenet, the Hungarian Goldmark, the German Humperdinck and Richard Strauss, the Polish Paderewski. England has more good composers and listeners than it ever had before; and the same is true of America.
"To show, above all," he wrote to Humperdinck in 1890, "that poetry is the true source of my music." When a man is both a poet and a musician, like Wagner, it is natural that his poetry and music should harmonise perfectly. But when it is a matter of translating the soul of other poets into music, special gifts of mental subtlety and an abounding sympathy are needed.
The composer who did this was Engelbert Humperdinck, and it is particularly noteworthy that his demonstration acquired its most convincing force from the circumstance that instead of seeking his material in the myths of antiquity, as Wagner did, he found them in the nursery.
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