Die Gänsemagd (The Goose Girl) (2009)
Children's opera based on the Brothers Grimm (Libretto: Helga Utz)
for 1 soprano, 2 mezzo-sopranos, 1 bass, 1 actor, Bb clarinet (also double bass clar.), violoncello, accordion, sample keybaord
Duration: 60 min.
DIRECTOR: Jewgenij Sitochin / LIBRETTO: Helga Utz / STAGE DESIGN: Roland Olbeter / LIGHTING: Bernd Purkrabek / ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: Barbara Schenter / STAGE DESIGN: Esterina Zarillo / ACTORS, SINGERS: Anna Manske, Theresa Dlouhy, Martina Supper, Wilfried Zelinka / Ulfried Staber, Sönke Schnitzer / MUSICIANS: Christoph Grund, Reinhold Brunner, Alfred Melichar, Maria Frodl
Performance material available from Boosey & Hawkes
60 min / from 6 years
Reviews
on the new production of September 2025 at the Hamburg State Opera by Tobias Kratzer
"The fresh production at the State Opera is fun - and delivers music with catchy tune potential." (Roland Kaiser on NDR)
see also:
Hamburger Abendblatt from 30.9.2025
"This is how exciting contemporary music theatre can be!"
"Humorous, subtle and engaging"
Review on Deutschlandfunk Sept. 2025 (audio)
"Children's opera by Iris ter Schiphorst"
Frankfurter Rundschau, 29/09/2025, Judith Sternberg
"...And that's not all The next day of the festival weekend, which in itself is a big, happy embrace, there's another setting: the artistic director stages (with co-director Matthias Piro) the children's opera "Die Gänsemagd" by Hamburg-born composer Iris ter Shiphorst, written by Helga Utz based on the Grimm fairy tale.
In the Opera Stabile studio stage, the audience sits in the centre on the floor, and the centre is the goose meadow. You are supposed to cackle along. The reward is perfect children's theatre, completely uncompromising musically, visually and in terms of the subject matter. Zero video on a circular stage beautifully designed by Sellmaier, but with a talking Falada head like you've never seen before. The theatre can do everything and better. Because Claudia Chan conducts the four-piece combo - including keyboard and double bass clarinet - and Ida Aldrian is just the most beautiful soprano voice in a glamorous, witty ensemble. A metre away, sometimes less. It may well be that a great theatre story began this weekend."
Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28.09.2025, Reinhard J. Brembeck
"...The next morning, Tobias Kratzer transforms the audience, mainly children and their parents, into a flock of geese in the small Opera Stabile theatre, who are supposed to shudder again and again and increasingly dare to do so. Everyone sits on the floor, the well-known 'Goose Maid' from the Grimm Brothers is played and sung around the audience, to which Iris ter Schiphorst has written atmospherically dense music with just four instruments. Claudia Chan subtly conducts to keep everything together and in flow. The music is often spoken by seven players, including the horse, but folk songs and avant-garde pieces are also sung. The one-hour piece combines slapstick with class arrogance, turns a princess into a goose maid and then back into a princess, presents aristocratic fools and shrewd underclassmen. ...
About the world premiere in the Wiener Dschungel February 2010
in the Kurier für junge Menschen, 19.02.2010
Pocket opera version of 'The Goose Girl' moves children
"Encore!" shouted the children spontaneously in the packed main auditorium of the Dschungel Wien. The very first performance of the musical version of "The Goose Girl" had just ended. For an hour and a half (with an interval), the children had followed the Viennese pocket opera's picture book story come to life with concentration and excitement, the stage dominated by a huge picture book of sorts for the individual scenes of the story of a lady-in-waiting who plays the princess. She wants to boss around on her way to and, above all, in the neighbouring kingdom, where the wedding with the king's son, a real klutz, is pending. The real princess becomes the eponymous goose maid after swearing not to tell anyone about the forced role reversal.
On the guest performance at Berlin's Radialsystem 2010
On kulturradio, 13.03.2010, Kai Luehrs-Kaiser
The secret of the Goose Maiden 's success is: new music. Although Iris ter Schiphorst's compositions are borderline tonal, she has mastered the (ingenious) trick of ensuring catchiness and recognisability by repeating individual, crooked and oblique arioso phrases. As the lyrics are sung with flawless clarity, children (from the age of six at the latest) follow along spellbound...