Scottish Opera’s Hansel and Gretel a sweet yet nourishing delight

The last time Emmanuel Joël-Hornak conducted Scottish Opera, it was in David McVicar’s dark and brooding 2008 production of Verdi’s La traviata. He has fond memories of working with the Scots producer. “He has a fantastic, brilliant mind. It was a magical experiences,” recalls the French maestro, who is back this week to conduct something that is a world apart from Verdi’s hot-blooded historical drama – Engelbert Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera Hansel and Gretel.

This time, he is working with director Bill Bankes-Jones, whose newly-commissioned English translation of the endearing German opera will give Scottish Opera’s first major new production of the season a major lift when it opens in Glasgow on Saturday.

It also marks a refreshing transition from David Pountney’s popular and well-worn translation created for English National Opera in the 1980s, and used in previous Scottish Opera stagings.

For Joël-Hornak such preconceptions are not an issue. He remembers seeing Hansel and Gretel when he was six, and enjoying it as an obvious children’s story, with its pop-up characters and innocent jokes. This is the first time he has ever conducted the opera, and as such declares himself “a virgin to it in any language”.

So does he go with the oft-held view that Hansel and Gretel is little more than a bit of tuneful 19th-century flotsam floating in the wake of Wagner’s operatic flotilla? Or even a one-tune, one-hit wonder from a composer whose name was directly pinched in the 1960s by one Arnold George Dorsey, famous as a latterday Engelbert Humperdinck with a string of pop hits that included Release Me and The Last Waltz?

“No, it’s not just about the jokes, although they are entertaining,” says Joël-Hornak. “I was always aware of a dark side to this opera, and now that I’m doing it I see much more of that deeper human element. Beneath the entertaining surface is a serious story about poor people struggling to the point of desperation where they send their children out into a dangerous place. It’s not sad; it’s lively and entertaining, but it’s also profound.”

The beauty of Bankes-Jones’ translation, says Joël-Hornak, is its simplicity. “That’s one of the most remarkable and difficult things to achieve. The original German text is, itself, very simple, which Bill has remained humble to. As a result, he captures all the necessary colours and emotions.”

As for the look and shape of this new production, all Joël-Hornak will say is that it is “honest and true to the work” “It’s not modern in the sense of Bill trying to show us a new way to do it. Yes, it reflects our own feelings about the opera, our own view. But it’s not meant as some kind of lecture on hidden meanings.”

Joël-Hornak’s own views are mainly about the music, and a score that is probably as famous for the single tune that dominates the entire opera (the Abendsegen, or Evening Hymn), as for the luscious, exorbitant scoring that has so often led to unwarranted charges of sub-Wagnerian unoriginality.

“Like most people, I remember looking at the score for the first time and thinking it was heavy, just like Wagner can be heavy,” says the French conductor. “But it’s a mistake to think of it simply as that. The wonderful thing about Humperdinck’s music is that, although it’s big, it’s also so well orchestrated that he manages to create beautiful moments of quietness and poetry.”

If it owes anything to Wagner, he says, then it is more directly linked to the intimacy and delicacy of the Siegfried Idyll, the symphonic poem for chamber ensemble which Wagner wrote for his wife’s birthday after the birth of their son Siegfried.

“It’s not just that both are effectively homages to children,” says Joël-Hornak. “Humperdinck’s score is similar in the way that everybody in the orchestra is involved everywhere, like a small factory. Everybody leads in some respect; there are no seconds. I like to think of Hansel and Gretel as a chamber opera with big orchestra. That’s the real musical challenge.”

Perhaps he has a point, given that Humperdinck’s original conception was, after all, small- scale, originating as just four songs with operatic potential. When these were finally turned into the full-length stage work, no less a voice than Richard Strauss – who conducted the 1893 premiere in Weimar – declared it “a masterpiece of the highest quality”.

Charming and refreshingly tuneful though this Märchenoper (or fairytale opera) is, does it really possess masterpiece credentials? Joël-Hornak places more value in assessing its position within the grand scheme of musical development in post-Wagnerian Germany, a time when many opera composers, reacting to the hegemony of the Wagner camp, reacted with works that ditched pungent Teutonic myth for something much lighter in spirit.

He spells it out in broader musical terms: “I think of it more as the last opera that Bruckner might have written, had he written any; or the first that Mahler might have written, given its emphasis on Kinder [children].”

Whichever way you look at it, Humperdinck’s greatest achievement was probably to provide a necessary breathing space between the hot and steamy Romanticism of Wagner and the titillating effervescence which allowed Strauss to take opera into the 20th century.

Scottish Opera’s new production of Hansel and Gretel boasts a young but accomplished cast. Both the upcoming Estonian mezzo soprano Kai Rüütel (Hansel) and Irish soprano Ailish Tynan (Gretel) have experience in the title roles as young generation artists at London’s Covent Garden. Rüütel’s Hansel was described by one critic as “bristling with the grumpiness unique to boys on the cusp of puberty, her voice crisp and forthright”; Tynan’s Gretel was quite simply labelled “a revelation”.

For Joël-Hornak such youthfulness has been just another refreshing bonus in bringing this production alive. “They are a very young cast, but they are amazingly well prepared, and extremely flexible.” Sounds like magic to me.

• Scottish Opera’s new production of Hansel and Gretel opens at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow on 4 February, with further performances on 8, 10 and 12 February, and then transfers to Edinburgh Festival Theatre on 14 February, with further performances on 16 and 18 February. More information at www.scottishopera.org.