Fairy Tales
“Once upon a time” - fairytales favour certain formulae and clichés: heroes’ trials, numbers, encounters with the supernatural and miraculous. Playlist curated by Christoph Vratz.
Read more…The fact that at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a revival of interest in small forms such as legends and fairytales is no coincidence. The Romantics rediscovered not only subject matter of the Middle Ages, but also the folksong. All at once interest in small forms such as legends and fairytales was aroused. When the first volume of the Grimm Brothers' ‘Children's and Household Tales’ (‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen’) appeared in print, it was the beginning of a long success story - the KHM is the best-selling book in the German-speaking world after the Bible.
Many of the fairytales documented by the Brothers Grimm are based on oral lore. Only in a very few cases is there a literary predecessor. Cinderella is based on material from the c.1697 collection of Frenchman Charles Perrault under the title “Cendrillon ou la Petite Pantoufle de verre”. Musically Cinderella appears in several different variations. Rossini actually didn’t have a fairy tale opera in mind. His librettist Jacopo Feretti remembers: “I grew tired of making suggestions and mumbled half-asleep and mid-yawn “Cinderella”...Rossini, who had climbed into bed in order to think more clearly, suddenly sat up.” The idea had been born...
Sergei Prokofiev created Cinderella as a ballet with waltzes and historical dance forms such as the Gavotte, Passepied, Bourrée and Mazurka, as well as the essential classical ballet forms (Pas de Deux, Adagios and Variations). Already we are in a different world to the Cinderella of Perrault or the Brothers Grimm.
A fairy tale opera is not created simply by using certain motifs, characters and plots. According to the fairytale researcher Heinz Rölleke, “the second layer of the fairytale, the possible meanings of the images, the inner emotional life of the characters, all of this cannot be brought to the opera stage”. In an essay on Raff’s ‘Dörnröschen’, Franz Liszt criticised the work, saying that he missed "some of the symbolic elements" and that the composer had blurred the "inner meaning of the fairy tale". Liszt reminds us that the more the poets take possession of these materials and make them theirs, the special character of the fairy tale "in which the fantastic, in particular, shrouds some obvious truths" rapidly disappears. A warning that has not been heeded...
Not only complete fairytales, but also also individual fairytale motives have made their way into operas. Wagner’s ‘Siegfried’ is a well-known example. In the third act, Siegfried walks towards the sleeping Brunhild and suddenly notices: Yikes, that’s a woman!
“My hand trembles on my beating heart!/Why have I become a coward?/Is this fear?/O mother, mother, this is your valiant child!/A woman lies asleep/and she has taught him to be afraid.” No doubt, this is a reference to Grimms’ fairytale ‘The Story of a Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear’. Wagner himself writes in one of his letters: “Have I not written to you before about a cheerful subject matter? It was the boy, who goes forth to learn fear, but is so stupid that he won’t learn it. Imagine my shock, when I noticed that the boy is no other than - the young Siegfried, who awakens Brunhild”.
From time to time, reinterpretations of fairytales are simply accounted for by the practicalities of the opera business. Arias that can not be found in the original story are woven in, or characters’ vocations are switched. What would Humperdinck’s ‘Hansel and Gretel’ be without the broom maker song? In the Grimms’ version the father is a lumberjack, however that would be difficult to put into music adequately. Therefore, one-on-one adaptations from fairytales to the opera stage rarely work. There are many parallels between ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and the fairytale of ‘Tom Thumb’ as told by Perrault. In ‘Ma Mère l’Oye’, Maurice Ravel wanted to evoke “the poetry of childhood” and has therefore knowingly “simplified his style and adapted to a transparent composition”.
One example for the psychological-symbolistic opera is “Barbe-Bleue”. It is one of those fairy tales that has not found its way on the opera stage through the Grimm Brothers. The text can only be found in the first edition of the “Children’s and Household Tales” and was left out in the following editions. Therefore the Perrault material from 1697 became the main literary source for the work’s music history. It tells the story of a man with a penchant for murdering women who forbids his young wife from opening one of the doors in his house. Maurice Maeterlinck has edited this material and Paul Dukas set it to music, before a certain Herbert Bauer (under the pseudonym of Béla Balázs) used the material to write a libretto. Béla Bártok based his "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" on this version of a text to create a psychodrama in the modern sense. It has little to do with the original fairy tale, apart from the core of the narrative and a few fairytale ingredients, such as the symbolic number of seven locked doors.
Among the less known fairytales that only gained popularity when they were set to music are the two Carl Orff operas ‘The Moon’ and ‘The Wise Woman’ - both can be found in the Grimm collection. The fact that ‘The Wise Woman’ is not even a fairytale in the strictest sense (but rather an anecdote) is of little importance.