The little girl with the matchstick

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Illustration by AJ Bayes (1889)
Memorial to the fairy tale in Gråsten (Gravenstein)

The little girl with the sulfur sticks (Danish: Den lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne ) is one of the most famous art fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen . He wrote it in 1845 during a nine-day stay at Gravenstein Castle on the Flensburg Fjord . It is the tragic story of a little girl who, freezing, sells sulfur sticks in the street and dies in the process. In the later reception the story was often kitsched up as a sentimental touching piece; Strictly speaking, it is a cleverly packaged, sharp social criticism .

action

A little girl sits on the street on New Year's Eve to sell her sulfur sticks. It is poorly dressed and freezes; the citizens busy with their holiday errands overlook the child and his begging goods. Without having earned anything, however, the girl does not dare to go home and freezes between two townhouses.

Desperate with the cold, the girl lights one of the matches, although she is strictly forbidden to do so. In the light of the stick she feels as if she is sitting by a warm stove, but this only lasts until the sulfur wood goes out. Little by little the girl lights the other matches and slides into ever richer dreams. Eventually it meets its grandmother and asks her to take it to heaven. The grandmother takes the girl: "(...) they were with God". In the story it becomes clear that the girl who lives and suffers in this world died a "gentle" frostbite in the real world . At the same time the narrator concludes that "Nobody knew what beautiful things she had seen, in what splendor she had entered with the old grandmother to celebrate the New Year!"

Film adaptations

Settings

An opera under the title Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern was written by August Enna in 1897 in the style of Richard Wagner's musical drama . 100 years later, in 1997, Helmut Lachenmann's music theater Das Mädchen mit der Schwefelhölzern was premiered at the Hamburg State Opera.

The composer Christian Bruhn set a text by Georg Buschor about the fairy tale to music. The song was sung by Manuela in 1968 and released on a single. This song was later recorded and published by other artists as well. a. by the Duo Gitti & Erica and by Claudia Jung .

In 2006 the British band The Tiger Lillies released the concept album The Little Matchgirl .

At the end of 2009, a modernized new version of the fairy tale by Karl M. Sibelius was premiered at Theater Eisenhand Linz (Upper Austria) under the title Matchgirl Opera , in which music by The Tiger Lillies was used, among other things .

The American composer Gordon Getty composed The Little Match Girl for choir and orchestra based on Andersen's fairy tale in the 2010s .

In 2013 the Swedish musicians Anna von Hausswolff and Matti Bye composed an album between pop and film music based on Andersen's fairy tales under the project name Hydra's Dream . The CD was released in March 2014 by the German record label Denovali . The singer and actress Meret Becker sets the story in one song on her first album Noctambule , recorded live in 1996 in the Bar every reason .

In 2015 the band Fuchsteufelswild released the song Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern on their album Weltenmeer .

Director Marc Gruppe linked the fairy tale for the radio play of the same name with its three other fairy tales about the snowman, the steadfast tin soldier and the Christmas tree .

Edits

Tomi Ungerer's picture book Allumette (French: allumette = match) , published in 1974 by Diogenes Verlag in Zurich , took up the motif of the starving child, for which not even pennies are needed in the consumer fever of the wealthy . Ungerer's title character is saved from freezing to death by a cornucopia that showered him with food and goods. In 2005 Michael Neugebauer Edition published an edition with pictures by the Czech illustrator Květa Pacovská , and in 2009 Seh-Sam Verlag published a small edition with illustrations by Henrike Robert. The poet Peter Hacks also takes up the subject (work edition, vol. 1, p. 204). But he does not advise those who freeze to death to die and let the romantics mourn them. His freezing girl dreams of an alternative use for her last match.

See also

literature

  • Hans Christian Andersen: All fairy tales. 8th edition. BG Teubner , Leipzig 1863, pp. 445–449 ( digitized in the Google book search).

Web links

Commons : The Little Match Girl  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hauke ​​Lange-Fuchs: The ugly duckling and other film stories. Hans Christian Andersen in the film . Documentation, Nordic Film Days Lübeck 1999; P. 40
  2. ↑ buchwurm.org: The little girl with the sulfur sticks, audio CD
  3. ↑ The girl with the sulfur sticks. 200 years of Hans Christian Andersen. (Translated by Britta Coordes), Michael Neugebauer Edition, Kiel 2005, ISBN 978-3-86566-027-5 .