of
his legs on the wheel. Seeking his home, the prince and his love lose
their way in the forest during a snowstorm and die of a poisoned loaf
made by the witch, for which the prince had bartered his broken crown,
under the same tree which had sheltered them on their first meeting;
but the children of Hellabrunn, who had come out in search of them,
guided by a bird, find their bodies buried under the snow and give them
royal acclaim and burial. And the prescient minstrel hymns their
virtues.

This is the story of Engelbert Humperdinck's opera "Konigskinder,"
which had its first performance on any stage at the Metropolitan Opera
House, New York, on December 28,1910, with the following cast:

Der Konigssohn......................Herman Jadlowker
Die Gansemagd.......................Geraldine Farrar
Der Spielmann........................... Otto Goritz
Die Hexe................................Louise Homer
Der Holzhacker.......................... Adamo Didur
Der Besenbinder........................ Albert Reiss
Zwei Kinder..............Edna Walter and Lotte Engel
Der Ratsalteste....................... Marcel Reiner
Der Wirt..........................Antonio Pini-Corsi
Die Wirtstochter................... Florence Wickham
Der Schneider.......................... Julius Bayer
Die Stallmagd.........................Marie Mattfeld
Zwei Torwachter..... Ernst Maran and William Hinshaw

Conductor: Alfred Hertz

To some in the audience the drama was new only in the new operatic
dress with which Humperdinck had clothed it largely at the instance of
the Metropolitan management. It had been known as a spoken play for
twelve years and three of its musical numbers--the overture and two
pieces of between-acts music--had been in local concert-lists for the
same length of time. The play had been presented with incidental music
for many of the scenes as well as the overture and entr'actes in 1898
in an extremely interesting production at the Irving Place Theatre,
then under the direction of Heinrich Conried, in which Agnes Sorma and
Rudolf Christians had carried the principal parts. It came back four
years later in an English version at the Herald Square Theatre, but
neither in the German nor the English performance was it vouchsafed us
to realize what had been the purpose of the author of the play and the
composer of the music.

The author, who calls herself Ernst Rosmer, is a woman, daughter of
Heinrich Forge