The Frog Prince or Iron Henry

The Frog Prince or Iron Henry is a story included in the Grimm Brothers first collection of “Children’s and Household Tales” from 1812. Many of the elements are quite familiar from various retellings. There is no more familiar trope or universal allegory than the once handsome Prince who is turned into a frog by a witch’s curse. However, the original Grimm Brothers story has some striking divergences from the more recent retellings.

I like telling stories with music or put another way, I like arranging musical elements to trace an ebb and flow of energy and emotion similar to that of following a story. The narrative could be based on an existing story such as The Frog Prince or Iron Henry or merely create the rhetoric of a story in the abstract.

Fairy tales are particularly appealing musical instigators for several reasons: They often have strange creatures, magic, and fantastical imagery that can nudge my musical imagination. The familiar ritualized repetition, often occurring in threes – three wishes, three tasks, etc. – translates well into musical form. There is often the possibility of interesting interactions between diegetic sounds that the characters would hear – the splash of water or the croaking of a frog – and non-diegetic sound that represents the inner life of the characters.

The Frog Prince or Iron Henry (2026) is the most recent in a series of works for narrator and ensemble preceded by Myrtle and Mint (1995), Slide (2009), Memoir (2021) and the Girl With No Hands (2024). I like to think of these works as opera without the singing.

-SM