Hansel And Gretel - Zurich Opera House DVD

Humperdinck's first and most successful opera began life as a commission from his sister Adelheid Wette, who asked him to write music for a children's play she had adapted from the Brothers Grimm tale, Hansel und Gretel. Humperdinck initially provided his sister with just four songs, but was soon convinced of the fable's operatic potential and, three years later, came up with a work that Richard Strauss described as a masterpiece of the highest quality & all of it original, new and so authentically German. Strauss was not alone in seeing Hansel und Gretel as the salvation of German opera, bringing relief from the murky Wagnerian depths of Teutonic myth and initiating a return to the shimmering world of the fairy-tale.

DVD. 105 minutes. Color.