LITERATURE

Hans Christian Andersen is a unique figure in the history of the fairy tale. As a young boy, he was influenced by the wondrous tales of the Brothers Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and other German Romantic writers, as well as by Danish folklore, and his tales cannot be fully appreciated without understanding his interest in these works. But Andersen went his own way: He was the first European writer to appeal both to children and to adults with stunning and provocative tales. Indeed, he developed an inimitable style and tone that transformed fairy tales into passionate and ironic stories that recorded the bitter struggles of artists and marginalized people to discover a modicum of joy in their lives. Throughout his life Andersen experimented with idiomatic language and popular art forms, endowing the fairy tale with novel motifs and characters that anticipated modernism. Andersen was always on a quest for something new. He traveled widely in Europe and based his tales on his personal experiences and encounters with the leading European artists of his time.

In his extensive travels Andersen made the acquaintance of many eminent writers, including Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, the Brothers Grimm, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Henry James, Heinrich Heine, and Charles Dickens (to whom Andersen dedicated A Poet’s Day Dreams, 1853). Andersen was also a close friend of poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Once, when visiting the Brownings in Rome, he read aloud “The Ugly Duckling” as Robert Browning clownishly acted it out for a group of children. Elizabeth Browning dedicated her final poem— “North and South”—to Andersen; in it “North” refers to Andersen’s native Denmark, while the city of Rome, a popular vacation spot, is the “South.” The poem’s final stanza reads:

The North sent therefore a man of men
As a grace to the South;
And thus to Rome came Andersen.
—“Alas, but must you take him again?”
Said the South to the North.

Andersen influenced and was influenced by numerous writers during his lifetime, but it was after his death that his works became significant referential points for many European and American writers of fairy tales, short stories, and novels. In England, the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde and Andrew Lang were marked by Andersen. At the beginning of the twentieth century Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann noted that they were influenced by Andersen’s tales when they were young. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, writers of fairy tales around the world, along with illustrators, demonstrated time and again in their works that the fairy tale as a genre had to reckon with Andersen’s presence.

FILM

Between the 1930s and the 1950s the Walt Disney Company distinguished itself as the most enterprising animation studio and produced a string of critically acclaimed feature-length cartoons, including Snow White (1937) and Bambi (1942). But as the cost of producing animation rose, Disney’s commitment to major animation efforts waned, and after releasing Sleeping Beauty (1959), the company failed to produce a remarkable animated picture for nearly thirty years. In 1989 The Little Mermaid, based on Andersen’s fairy tale, put Disney back on the map. Written and directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, The Little Mermaid showcases bright, fluid animation in a palette based on the sea—coral colors like fuchsia and butter yellow alongside shades of aquamarine. The film is buoyed by the witty songwriting of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (Little Shop of Horrors).

What makes The Little Mermaid a classic equal to the movies of Disney’s golden age is the clever, rebellious, and winsome character Ariel. The crux of the story is Ariel’s defiance of her father, King Triton, ruler of the sea, who forbids her from venturing above water into the human realm. But when she falls in love with a handsome prince and swaps her trademark voice (supplied by Jodi Benson) for a pair of human legs with the help of Ursula, a cunning sea-witch octopus, Ariel must rely on her friends Flounder and Sebastian, a calypso crab. Together the three wend their way toward romantic happiness and a state of harmony among creatures of the land and sea—in a departure from Andersen’s original, in which the main character is transmuted into sea-foam.

The trend of using computer-generated imagery to supplement animation began, albeit to a limited degree, with The Little Mermaid. The Oscar category Best Animated Picture was not instituted until the 2001 Academy Awards, well into the age of CGI animation. Nonetheless, The Little Mermaid held its own at the 1990 Oscars. Menken and Ashman were nominated for their song “Kiss the Girl,” which was beat out by another, even catchier number from the film: Sebastian’s “Under the Sea.” Alan Menken earned an award for his score.

After regaining its status as an animator with a spate of releases during the 1990s, Disney again turned to Andersen as source material for The Emperor’s New Groove (2000). Written by David Reynolds and directed by Mark Dindal, the film takes Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as a loose premise and plays upon it most creatively. The result is a fun-filled romp, with the Peruvian emperor Kuzco, played with sarcastic relish by David Spade, changed into a Ilama by his embittered adviser Yzma (Eartha Kitt). The Emperor’s New Groove is an episodic journey filled with gags and spectacle, plus musical offerings such as the occasional buddy song sung by Kuzco and John Goodman’s Pacha (a peasant whom Kuzco had earlier threatened to banish) and Tom Jones’s crooning contribution, “Perfect World.” The Emperor’s New Groove earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Song, for “My Funny Friend and Me,” composed by Sting and David Hartley, and performed by Sting.

Disney is not the only film studio to have produced remarkable films based on Andersen’s fairy tales. Paul Grimault and Jacques Prévert produced one of the finest animation films, Le Roi et l’Osieau (The King and the Bird, 1979), based on “The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep.” In addition, film studios in Russia, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Canada have produced more than thirty films based on such popular tales as “The Princess on the Pea,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and “The Little Mermaid.”

Music

It is fitting that many composers have paid tribute to Andersen with their music, as his remarkable singing voice inspired the childhood nickname “Nightingale” and he later became an accomplished librettist. He counted among his friends composers Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, and many others.

Charting Andersen’s influence in Scandinavia alone, Danish author Gustav Hetsch, in H. C. Andersen and Music (1930), listed twenty-nine Nordic composers who had set music to Andersen’s tales and poems or who had written music inspired by Andersen’s life. Christoph Weyse, a Danish composer who was known mainly for his sacred music and songs, and in 1819 was appointed court composer, became Andersen’s first benefactor. Along with Danish poet and dramatist Adam Oehlenschläger, Andersen wrote five cantatas (singspiels) and one light opera for Weyse. And Andersen wrote operatic libretti to two works by Sir Walter Scott, both produced in 1832: Weyse’s Kenilworth and I. Bredal’s The Bride of Lammermoor. Andersen’s close friend Schumann based his “Five Songs” (1840) on five pieces from Andersen’s oeuvre of more than a thousand poems. For another collaborator, J. P. E. Hartmann, Andersen wrote the libretto to Little Kirsten (1846), which remains one of the most popular Danish operas.

By this time, Andersen was seen as a literary giant and a national hero. At the relatively young age of forty-five, he completed an epic homage to his homeland, In Denmark I Was Born, that was rendered into music by Henrik Rung (1850); in 1926 Poul Schierbeck premiered his own version, which pays tribute to Andersen and Rung. In 1865 Andersen met Norway’s preeminent composer, Edvard Grieg, in Copenhagen. Their resulting friendship led to Grieg’s collection “The Heart’s Melodies,” which features songs inspired by Andersen, including two for piano and soprano: the teasing, playful “Two Brown Eyes” and “I Love You,” which sounds like a cross between a jazz ballad and a Danish show tune.

After Andersen’s death, musical compositions inspired by his writings multiplied and today show no sign of abating. A list of these, by no means comprehensive, includes Johan Bartoldy’s operetta The Swineherd (1886); Igor Stravinsky’s brief opera The Nightingale (1914); Finn Høffding’s It’s Perfectly True (1943); Frank Loesser’s musical film Hans Christian Andersen (1952); the symphonic works The Most Incredible Thing (1997), by Sven Erik Werner, and The Woman with the Eggs (1998), by the Danish composer known only as Fuzzy; and Svend Hvidtfelt Nielsen’s chamber opera The Little Mermaid (1999-2000).

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