The King's Children

After Engelbert Humperdinck achieved sensational success with Hansel and Gretel, he did not rest on his laurels. With a strong sense of artistic invention, he took the genre of the fairy-tale opera to new dimensions with his next major stage work, The Kings's Chrildren.

Based on a literary fairy tale by Elsa Bernstein, this touching and tragic love story between a goose girl and a young king’s son opened the genre to the symbolist poetry of Art Nouveau as well as to the emerging ideas of early psychoanalysis. Humperdinck so perfectly captured the spirit of his time that the 1910 world premiere of Königskinder at the Metropolitan Opera in New York marked the beginning of a worldwide series of performances. Eventually, however, the opera fell into relative obscurity. It is therefore time to bring Königskinder back into lasting memory in Linz, as Chief Conductor Markus Poschner bids farewell to his audience at the Musiktheater with this work.