D.he hall 2 in the Deutz State House, the former exhibition hall that serves as interim accommodation for the Cologne Opera House, has no orchestra pit. Occasionally one has experimented with placing the orchestra musicians to the side, but in the new production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s fairy tale play “Hansel and Gretel” the very large romantic orchestra for this piece forms a black block between the stage and the audience. One could assume that this optical barrier makes things particularly difficult for the particularly young audience, which is to be particularly addressed with the selection of pieces. But the children also get to see something instructive in that part of the theater space that apparently cannot be tailored to suit children. So that something as amazing as an opera goes on stage, when and also a lot of people take part, who do their work invisibly or do not plan to draw the eyes of the audience.

One cannot look past the man who stands in the middle of the musicians and juts out into the picture, as she would carry him on her shoulders. His head is shiny because he has very little hair left. The black-clad man moves no less vigorously than the people on the stage, but differently. They play something, have rehearsed something and demonstrate it. In the first act, for example, Hansel and Gretel treat the brushwood brooms that you only know from fairy tales today, like air guitars. The two adult singers also pretend they are teenagers pretending to play the guitar. The conductor did not aim to recognize his poses. He is not the narrator in this fairy tale. His arms are in constant circles without any discernible pattern. Sometimes he extends one hand, sometimes the other, then he lets it go down like excavator shovels, like rummaging through a pile of crumpled wrapping paper under the Christmas tree because there might still be a package hidden there, or in a cookie plate on top of the other Marzipan potatoes under the pepper nuts.

The Cologne subscription audience can celebrate a week before Christmas. General Music Director François-Xavier Roth doesn’t visit his opera house quite as rarely as Santa Claus, but his contract stipulates that he has less compulsory conducting in the opera than is usual among colleagues in comparable offices. After the premiere, Roth will conduct eleven of the sixteen repertoire performances of the piece that the Frenchman praised on the radio as “the best composed opera ever”. This superlative may be astonishing; it surpasses Eduard Hanslick’s mocking judgment at the end of his review of the Vienna premiere by Siegfried Wagner, Richard Wagner’s son, that “Hansel and Gretel” is the most important German opera in the twelve years since “Parsifal”.

One must take Roth at his word; he will not have called the work the best opera of all, with care. Best composed: This refers to the style, the technical side, and which Humperdin took over from Richard Wagner, the connection of polyphony and leitmotif, the embedding of the declamation in an infinite melody. Hanslick criticizes a discrepancy between the refinement of the technical effort in detail and the ideal of an intimate overall effect derived from the genre of the fairy tale. The apparently makeshift installation of the Gürzenich Orchestra resulted in a test arrangement to check Hanslick’s verdict that the contradiction between material and form would become evident “when an over-engineered, pompous orchestra illustrates the mother’s reproach”.

In Cologne, the voices of the singers can not only be heard very well, despite the difficult spatial conditions, without appearing stressed. The lively, moving flow that Roth evokes with the digging of his hands also suggests a concept of the unity of a work of the genre fairytale play. The curious dispute that was fought after the premiere over the question of whether Humperdinck had processed existing folk songs such as the fairy tale or invented all the folk song melodies in the score throws off an aesthetic punch: you enjoy the simplicity and experience it as composed. Psychologically this means: A fairy tale story presupposes opposites of feelings which – this is the moment of the dream, the childlike hope – do not necessarily have to be carried out as conflicts when. The fairy tale has two title characters. They embody the simplest polar contrast, but do not become antagonists. Kathrin Zukowski and Anna Lucia Richter, who recently switched to the mezzo, enchant with the alternation of boyish and boyish timbres.

The staging by Béatrice Lachaussée consistently sees the piece as a drama of the innocent imagination. Hansel and Gretel are children of unemployed showmen. Your guardian spirits in the forest are cartoon characters that could have been drawn from Disney artist Mary Blair. Perhaps there is a cinema in the amusement park, which has been declared dead, showing old cartoons. The witch house is part of this two-dimensional world. When the witch disappears behind the stove flap, brown, rusty fittings become visible under the projections of the rotating pink and white cakes. This is not a disenchantment, it shows how the magic is done.