Engelbert Humperdinck

In the English-speaking world, Engelbert Humperdinck is regarded as a "one-work" composer, best-known for his 1893 opera Hänsel und Gretel. It was originally conceived as a family Christmas entertainment to a libretto by his sister Adelheid, but Humperdinck used all his experience – as a student of Josef Rheinberger, and from 1880 a trusted assistant to Richard Wagner at Bayreuth – to weave the playful fairy tale into an opera whose mixture of melodic freshness and Wagnerian orchestral magic made it an instant and enduring global success. Humperdinck, who was born in the Rhineland and wrote his first comic operas as a teenager, never enjoyed another comparable success, although his later fairy-tale operas Königskinder (1897) and Dornröschen (1902) were admired by contemporaries of the stature of Richard Strauss. Throughout his later career, Humperdinck was an active teacher in Barcelona, Frankfurt and later Berlin, and his pupils – in addition to Wagner's son Siegfried - included Kurt Weill and Robert Stolz. They each inherited something of Humperdinck's theatrical flair and gift for melody; and Humperdinck's later music includes a String Quartet (1920) and (at the request of the director Max Reinhardt) melodious incidental scores for plays including The Miracle, The Merchant of Venice and Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird.