King's children

After Engelbert Humperdinck's sensational success with Hansel and Gretel, he was not content to rest on his laurels. With his next major stage work, Königskinder, he took the genre of the fairy-tale opera to new dimensions with his original artistic creativity.

Based on a fairy tale by Elsa Bernstein, this touchingly sad love story of a goose-maid and a young king's son opened up the genre to the symbolist poetry of Art Nouveau as well as to the developments of young psychoanalysis. Humperdinck struck such a chord with his time that the premiere of Königskinder at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1910 marked the start of a worldwide series of performances of this work. At some point, however, the opera fell silent. So it's time to bring the Königskinder back to Linz as a lasting memory when Markus Poschner bids farewell to his music theater audience as chief conductor with this work.

In German with surtitles.