A Way with the Fairies: Matthew Rye welcomes the first full English-language assessment of Wagner’s disciple Engelbert Humperdinck

Review of William Melton, Humperdinck: A Life of the Composer of ‘Hänsel und Gretel’ (Toccata Press, 2020).

March 2021, Volume 15, Number 1, 94–6.

One tends to think of the late 19th century as the peak of operatic creativity in the German-speaking world, one where Wagner’s legacy swiftly led to Strauss’s rise. Yet twenty-three years separate the premieres of Parsifal and Salome, a period from which only one German opera can claim to have maintained a place in the repertory to this day, Humperdinck’s perennial charmer Hänsel und Gretel. It is no surprise that Wagner proved to be such a hard act to follow, despite the overweening influence his musical style and dramatic ambitions had on his successors, and not only in the realm of German opera, as Wagnerian tentacles spread via the likes of Chausson and Debussy in France and Holbrooke and Boughton in England. Elgar, too, if one acknowledges the highly Parsifalian cast of The Dream of Gerontius. (Elgar also turns out to have been a great admirer of Humperdinck’s music and was at one time worried that he was beginning to sound like him.)