force?  The question was frequently answered in a spirit antagonistic to Wagner; but many of the answers were overhasty and short-sighted.  It needed only that one should come who had thoroughly assimilated Wagner’s methods and had the genius to apply them in a spirit of individuality, to demonstrate that it was possible to continue the production of lyric dramas without returning to the hackneyed manner of the opposing school.  The composer who did this was Engelbert Humperdinck, and it is particularly noteworthy that his demonstration acquired its most convincing force from the circumstance that instead of seeking his material in the myths of antiquity, as Wagner did, he found them in the nursery.

While emphasizing this fact, however, it is well not to forget that in turning to the literature of folklore for an operatic subject Humperdinck was only carrying out one of the principles for which Wagner contended.  The Mahrchen of a people are quite as much a reflex of their intellectual, moral, and emotional life as their heroic legends and myths.  In fact, they are frequently only the fragments of stories which, when they were created, were embodiments of the most profound and impressive religious conceptions of which the people were capable.  The degeneration of the sun god of our Teutonic forefathers into the Hans of Grimm’s tale, who could not learn to shiver and shake, through the Sinfiotle of the “Volsunga Saga” and the Siegfried of the “Nibelungenlied,” is so obvious that it needs no commentary.  Neither should the translation of Brynhild into Dornroschen, the Sleeping Beauty of our children’s tales.  The progress illustrated in these examples is that from myth to Mahrchen, and Humperdinck in writing his fairy opera, or nursery opera if you will, paid tribute to German nationality in the same coin that Wagner did when he created his “Ring of the Nibelung.”  Everything about “Hansel und Gretel” is charming to those who can feel their hearts warm toward the family life and folklore of Germany, of which we are, or ought to be, inheritors.  The opera originated, like Thackeray’s delightful fireside pantomime for great and small children, “The Rose and the Ring.”  The composer has a sister, Frau Adelheid Wette, wife of a physician in Cologne.  She, without any particular thought of literary activity, had been in the habit of writing little plays for production within the family circle.  For these plays her brother provided the music.  In this way grew the first dramatic version of the story of Hansel and Gretel, which, everybody who has had a German nurse or has read Grimm’s fairy tales knows, tells the adventures of two children, a brother and sister, who, driven into the woods, fell into the toils of the Crust Witch (Knusperhexe), who enticed little boys and girls into her house, built of gingerbread and sweetmeats, and there ate them up.  The original performers of the principal characters in the play were the daughters of Frau Wette.  Charmed with the effect of the fanciful