When you think about it, there a really aren't many traditional, "Christmas time" operas. There's Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote an opera called, "Christmas Eve" -- but you don't hear it much. But, beyond that ...

Well, there is the opera we'll bring you this week. It has become a geniune Christmas tradition -- even though the drama itself actually has nothing to with Christmas at all! It's Humperdinck's Hänsel and Gretel. Think about it. Neither the opera nor the famous fairy tale it's based on make any mention of Christmas. Yet, somehow, the opera has been a perennial, holiday favorite for more than a century!

There are a couple of different reasons for that. For one thing, the premiere of Hänsel and Gretel took place just two days before Christmas, on December 23, 1893. But a better reason might be the nature of the opera's popularity. Christmas is a holiday made for kids, and the simple charm of Humperdinck's music has made his opera enormously popular with children. Of course the familiar, fairy tale story doesn't hurt, either. It's got an irresistable happy ending, yet it's dark enough to give kids a delicious scare. After all, the Wicked Witch that Hansel and Gretel encounter has fiendish plans to devour both kids for dinner, at least until they outsmart her!

We'll bring you a concert performance of the opera by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and conductor Andreas Delfs. The show stars Heidi Grant Murphy as Gretel and Susanne Mentzer as Hansel, with Judith Forst as a splendidly spooky witch. And if you and your kids enjoy the show enough to want to hear the opera again, the performance was released on compact disc -- with the recording co-produced by National Public Radio. See the Milwaukee Symphony's website for more details.