Tahu Matheson first encountered Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel as a five-year-old. He remembers the experience to this day. Taken backstage after a performance conducted by his father, John Matheson, young Tahu’s gaze met that of the Witch (played by a male tenor) in full theatrical makeup.

“Those were the days of full ‘witchface’ makeup, prosthetic noses and everything. I remember being quite terrified,” Matheson tells Limelight. “Back then, nobody shied away from trying to scare the living daylights out of you.”

That memory has come into even sharper focus of late, as Matheson prepares for a full-circle moment: stepping onto the podium to conduct Opera Australia’s revival of Elijah Moshinsky’s production of Hansel and Gretel.

Tahu Matheson leading rehearsals of OPera Australia’s Hansel and Gretel. Photo © Opera Australia

Featuring larger-than-life sets and a cast that includes Margaret Plummer and Stacey Alleaume in the title roles and Jane Ede as the Witch, Moshinsky’s version offers audiences humour and heart suffused with unsettling undercurrents drawn from the Brothers Grimm’s original story, one veined with fears of starvation, abandonment and the threat of cannibalism.

Written in the early 1890s, Humperdinck’s score is anything...