‘Hänsel und Gretel’: An Unlikely Christmas Story

Learn how one mother’s quest to soften the original fairy tale helped transform it into one of today’s beloved operas.

Siblings Adelheid Wette and Engelbert Humperdinck create the words and music for "Hänsel und Gretel," a Christmas favorite today. Public Domain

Adelheid Wette probably had no inkling that the little fairytale she was revising for her children would evolve into an opera that would become a global holiday tradition. The German fairytale “Hänsel und Gretel,” originally published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm, was a dark, violent story about two children intentionally abandoned by their mother and father in a deep forest, where a terrible, children-eating witch lived. Wette greatly softened the plot.

In Wette’s version, the frazzled, poor mother sent her children into the forest to pick strawberries for dinner. Wette added a kindly sandman, 14 angels, and a Dew Fairy to transform the dark and scary piece into one in which good triumphs over evil.

The Grim Grimm Tale

The fairy tale of “Hänsel und Gretel” (or Grethel) was one of many regional folk stories gathered by the Grimm brothers in their effort to portray and promote a German identity in the years before Germany’s unification. All of their collected stories, which include “Rapunzel,” “Snow White,” Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” and “Cinderella” are dark, truly grim stories, better, as we view them today, for adults to read after the kiddies go to bed than for children.