Classical Companion

A lifelong loner, unmarried and childless, Hans Christian Andersen was one of those authors for children who didn’t much care for children (or anyone else). Forget the image of Danny Kaye, in 1953, tip-tapping his way on to the silver screen with ‘I’m Hans Christian Andersen, I am’. The recollection of the poet Heine seems closer to the mark. ‘He is a haggard man with a hollow, sunken face, and his demeanour betrays an anxious, devout type of behaviour that kings love. He is the perfect representation of a poet, just the way kings want them to be.’

Frightful fables

The 19th century had fewer scruples about scaring children out of their wits. At the same time, children themselves have always been drawn to the macabre in ways that have alarmed their elders. Two Andersen stories in particular, set in or around Christmas time, have been set to music. Each of them ends happily, or at least in a state of redemption, but only after terrible cruelties have been visited upon their young protagonists. The Snow Queen has become famous through the girl-power adaptation by Disney, but it has also attracted several classical composers along the way [see Essential Recordings below]. Meanwhile, The Little Match Girl started life in 1846 not as an original idea on Andersen’s part, but a request from a magazine publisher to put narrative flesh on the bones of an illustration. Like other Andersen stories, The Little Match Girl relies for its shocking effect on a stark juxtaposition of horror and morality.

Above: Andersen’s tales spread far beyond his native Denmark, including a French version illustrated by Bertall

A poor young girl, whose father beats her, tries unsuccessfully to sell matches on the street on New Year’s Eve. She burns up all her matches in seeking to keep warm, inside and out, with a vision of her grandmother. Ignored by passers-by, she freezes to death, and is reunited with her grandmother in heaven. The tale requires no strenuous updating, or appeal to contemporary relevance, to illustrate inhumanity and innocence.

For all the pious Christian messaging, it is not a pretty story, nor an especially festive one. There are three operatic – or at least dramatic – settings, as contrasting in style as it is possible to imagine. The one-acter by Andersen’s fellow Dane August Enna is the operatic equivalent of a fireside cup of cocoa. The drawback to putting Andersen stories on the stage is that most of their protagonists are children; Enna simply assigns the part to an operatic soprano, and writes for her so gracefully that the illusion of youth comes off.

Above: August Enna, pictured here in 1892, was the first to make a stage version of Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic tale

Enna enigma

Enna had the talent (the craftsmanship also) to fashion a good tune, and the taste, and timing, not to draw out the story to mawkish lengths. It is a mystery to me why the piece has not been picked up outside Denmark. It would delight audiences young and old while lending itself to a staging more edgy than anything Enna could have had in mind. Both available recordings (on CPO and DaCapo) are well sung and recorded. The latter scores higher with its casting of Inger Dam-Jensen in the title role, and ingenious coupling with Zemlinsky’s three-part symphonic poem on the tale of The Little Mermaid.

For a broader survey of native Danish responses to Andersen, albeit in restricted sound, investigate the Danacord series of broadcast recordings made by the conductors Launy Grøndahl and Thomas Jensen. Both of them conducted concerts to mark the nationwide annual celebration of his birth on the 2nd of April. They included instrumental versions of more witty pieces such as Finn Hoffding’s It’s All True! as well as excerpts from ballet scores.

The best and most enduring of these ballets used to be a staple of Danish stages at Christmas time: Tolv Med Posten – Twelve by the Mail – by Knudage Riisager. Andersen tells the story of a mail coach stopping at a house each month, and the effect is comparable to Glazunov’s glorious score for The Seasons, though Riisager writes with a neoclassical wit and energy that make the score contemporary with Stravinsky’s Pulcinella.

Cold comfort

Back to The Little Match Girl. The story has attracted two much less comforting modern treatments, both of them more or less true to the narrative but also to our less certain moral universe and fragmented culture. Helmut Lachenmann took the story as the basis for a stage work premiered in 1997, weaving in additional texts by Leonardo da Vinci, Nietzsche and Gudrun Ensslin (one of the ringleaders of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group in the 1970s).

Lachenmann notes how the girl speaks to no one, and no one speaks to her. ‘That means, when she sings, she’s freezing, shivering, coughing for air.’ This alienation is realised on several levels of the score. The role of the girl is taken by different sopranos; individual words are rarely sung so much as whispered and broken up, syllable by syllable, over an instrumental texture equally spare and haunting.

Above: The ECM recording of Lachenmann’s radical retelling demands close listening

Lachenmann’s soundworld takes time and close listening – perhaps best experienced live – whereas audiences worldwide have responded to The Little Match Girl Passion composed by David Lang in 2007, and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music the following year. Expressions of pain and loss are mediated in Lang’s music by a soothing surface of rhythmic catches, while his airborne melodies are made for voices and narratives of vulnerability. Lang’s harmony is retro-fitted for adventurous ensembles specialising in early music, such as a cappella quartet Anonymous 4 and Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices, for whom he wrote The Little Match Girl Passion.

Bittersweet balance

As Lang remarks, ‘the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts – the horror and the beauty – are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl’s bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope’. The intimate scoring, for solo voices and percussion, responds to the kind of spatial recording that leaves its ethereal melodies floating in a virtual space, heightened further on headphones.

Unlike Lachenmann’s take, Lang’s serene conclusion respects Andersen’s wish that the girl’s heavenly reunion with her grandmother be regarded as a happy ending, grim as it may seem to us now. It is a piece of musical porcelain, fragile yet perfectly formed to hold its story.

Essential Recordings

Basel CO/Christopher Hogwood
Arte Nova 82876506932
The complete ballet in the original chamber version: played, conducted and recorded with lucid, plain-speaking vitality.

San Francisco SO/Michael Tilson Thomas
Sony 82876658402, RCA 09026635112
Full ballet, full orchestra: affectionate tempi and impressionistic textures underlining Copland’s mastery of orchestration.

Ensemble K/Simone Menezes
Aparté AP243
Suite, chamber version: taps into the homespun modesty and simplicity like few others, but in high-finish modern engineering.

BBC Philharmonic/John Wilson
Chandos CHSA5164
Suite, orchestral version: the Chandos engineering brings a wide-screen panorama to the open harmonies and sturdy dances.

Pittsburgh SO/William Steinberg
DG 4864442 (17CDs)
Suite, orchestral version: no-nonsense tempi from Steinberg, analytical Command Classics sound, newly remastered by DG.

Columbia CO/Aaron Copland
Sony 19439977462 (20CDs)
Complete ballet, chamber version: dry sound, even in a new remastering, patchy execution, but imbued with unique authenticity.

Lang: The Little Match Girl Passion
Cantaloupe CA21184
Trio Mediæval and colleagues in an intimate studio version of this hypnotic reimagining of Andersen’s tale for our time.

Lachenmann: Das Mädchen mit der Schwefelhölzern
ECM 4761283 (2CDs)
Sylvain Cambreling and German radio forces bring long experience of Lachenmann’s sonic splinters to bear on this bewitching score.

Enna: The Little Match Girl
Da Capo 8226048
Thomas Dausgaard leads Danish radio forces in this romantic one-acter, coupled with Zemlinsky’s take on The Little Mermaid.

Abrahamsen: The Snow Queen
BSO BSOREC2002 (DVD/Blu-ray)
Barbara Hannigan was Abrahamsen’s inspiration for his full-scale operatic retelling of the story adapted as Disney’s Frozen.

Hefti: Das Schneekönigin
Neos NEOS12028
The Swiss composer conducts a cast including Mojca Erdmann as the Snow Queen in his modern-expressionist retelling.

Riisager: Twelve By The Mail
Danacord DACOCD919 (2CDs)
Thomas Jensen conducts the Danish Radio in a suite from Knud Riisager’s picaresque ballet on an Andersen-themed compilation.