Witches

Have been to see "Hansel and Gretel" by Englebert Humperdinck (no, not that one, this is the German composer) at The Millenium Centre, Cardiff, performed by The Welsh National Opera Company. And a very impressive production it was.
It has some wonderful music in it, so immediately attractive that you wonder why more of Humperdinck's music is not heard. There is a superb passage at the end of Act 1 when the two children are taken care of by guardian angels.
Then came Act 2 and it proved to be rather a mess. I think the faults lay largely with the opera itself though I wonder if the producer exacerbated the faults by having the witch played as a rather comic character.
He (the witch is a tenor, played by a man) was simply not terrifying enough. Though the opera is new to me I have the feeling that the witch should scare the living daylights out of the audience. There was a good sprinkling of children in the audience so it might have been thought wise not to frighten them too much.
They uderestimate how frights in stories appeal greatly to children: while being frightened they know that they are watching a fictional work and that what is frightening is going on there, not here with them.
Whatever, this witch brought to mind a few of Walt Disney's horrid women (they may not have been witches, all of them, but they were all certainly frightening creatures). Take the queen in "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs". What a superbly horrific, terrifying creation! And the witch in "Sleeping Beauty" is equally terrifying.
Disney is much maligned these days; people talk of the Disnification of our times. Well, after Disney's death, things went rather down the drain. The creative spirit that had conjured up such grotesques as the queen and the wicked witch and, of course, the cat in Cinderella - he should have been given an oscar! - died with him. He was a creative genius without parallel - no, Dickens with his marvellous characters and, you have to admit, his loads of sentimentalty, stands alongside him I think.
I feel that Humperdinck was made of sterner stuff than what was presented as his creation in the production I saw: the witch should not be played as a panto dame but as a Disney queen.