Humperdinck: Der Blaue Vogel – Tast

Somewhere in Humperdinck’s papers there must have been a sigh of relief the day this score finally went back into a drawer. He had, after all, already given the world its one indispensable fairy-tale opera — Hänsel und Gretel still packs houses every December, its unpretentious tunefulness disguising some very sophisticated Wagnerian mastery underneath. What he wrote for Max Reinhardt’s 1912 Berlin production of Der Blaue Vogel is a different animal altogether: incidental music, meant to underscore Maeterlinck’s whimsical philosophical pageant rather than stand on its own, and for over a century it did nothing of the kind. Legal wrangling among heirs kept the complete manuscript locked away, unpublished, essentially unheard. Steffen Tast’s discovery and reconstruction is therefore something close to an archaeological event — not a lost masterpiece exactly, but a real and valuable piece of theater history finally allowed to speak.

Maeterlinck’s play, for those who know it only through the 1940 Shirley Temple film or the odd, faded 1976 Cicely Tyson-Elizabeth Taylor version, follows two children, Tyltyl and Mytyl, on a quest for the Blue Bird of Happiness — a symbol that recedes exactly as fast as you approach it. Simple idea, endlessly adaptable, which is presumably why it conquered Moscow in 1908 and Broadway soon after and kept generating adaptations — including a genuinely bad opera by Albert Wolff that tries to cosplay Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and fails at every turn. Humperdinck’s music, mercifully, doesn’t try to be Debussy. It tries to be Humperdinck: modally tinged, harmonically lush without excess, scored with the kind of orchestral finesse that comes from having absorbed Parsifal at Bayreuth and then quietly gone his own way.

The songs and choral numbers are where the score really lives. There’s a wistfulness in the writing for the Rundfunkchor Berlin’s upper voices — clean, blended, faintly luminous — that recalls the “Evening Prayer” from Hänsel without ever quoting it. Humperdinck knew exactly how far a children’s chorus could carry pathos before it curdled into sentimentality, and he stops short every time. That restraint is the whole game with this composer; it’s why the Witch’s oven doesn’t feel like kitsch and why, here, the Fairy Bérylune’s music doesn’t either.

Tast’s own contribution — the Seven Symphonic Pictures assembled from the score in 2021 — is a more debatable proposition. As a standalone orchestral suite it’s engagingly scored and idiomatically respectful of the source, but it inevitably flattens material that depended on stagecraft, on the visual transformation of scenery, on children in the dark watching a bird change color. Without Reinhardt’s machinery the music has to do more narrative work than Humperdinck ever asked of it, and there are stretches — the “Kingdom of the Future” sequence especially — where the orchestral fabric thins and you feel the absence of the spectacle it once accompanied.

Juri Tetzlaff narrates the complete incidental score with an unforced, faintly ironic warmth — never twee, never arch, which is a real accomplishment given how easily this material tips into treacle. German diction is crisp throughout; the English translation in the booklet is serviceable if occasionally stiff, the kind of prose that reads like it wants footnotes.

Steffen Tast conducts the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin with evident affection and a light hand — tempos breathe, transitions are unhurried, the orchestra’s winds in particular bring real character to Humperdinck’s woodwind writing, which owes more to his teacher’s generation than to 1912 modernism. There isn’t a rival disc to measure this against — that’s rather the point of the release — so judgment has to rest on the interpretation’s own terms. On those terms it succeeds handsomely: idiomatic, unforced, alive to the score’s modest but genuine charms.

Nobody is going to mistake this for a neglected masterpiece on the order of the Hänsel score, and Capriccio isn’t claiming otherwise. But as a document of Reinhardt-era theater practice, and as further proof that Humperdinck’s craftsmanship rarely flagged even in second-tier commissions, this release earns its place. Recommended — with the caveat that you come to it as theater history first, concert music second.