PUBLISHED IN 1844, “The Snow Queen” has had many updates and remakes. Hans Christian Andersen’s wintry fable even lies behind “Frozen”, Disney’s animated blockbuster from 2013, a sequel to which has recently been released. For his first opera, Hans Abrahamsen—a Danish compatriot of Andersen’s and composer—has transformed the tale of a girl’s quest for a lost friend bewitched by icy powers into a sparkling snowscape of orchestral and vocal colours. His music swirls and settles in tantalising, exquisite and occasionally sinister patterns.

Mr Abrahamsen, now 67, has often proved his mastery of winter music through minutely detailed scores that build into shimmering, fractal wonderlands of sound. One of his most ambitious works is simply entitled “Snow”. His setting of “The Snow Queen” originally opened with a Danish libretto in Copenhagen in October: the Danish Royal Opera, which commissioned the work, had stipulated a Danish text. However, he had written it with Barbara Hannigan, a Canadian soprano, in mind for the main part of Gerda. The singer and conductor’s collaboration with Mr Abrahamsen has already resulted in an icily beautiful song cycle with words derived from Ophelia’s lines in “Hamlet”. That won the Grawemeyer Award—a leading honour for classical music—and recently topped a critics’ survey of this century’s best compositions.

Thanks to the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, admirers of Ms Hannigan’s and Mr Abrahamsen’s work together have not had long to wait. With Ms Hannigan singing Gerda, the German company’s English-language version of the opera opened on December 21st. Outside, the grey, damp Bavarian weather may have failed to channel the right mood. Inside the theatre, however, Andreas Kriegenburg’s direction and Harald Thor’s set designs summoned an entrancingly chilled world of snowflakes and ice-flowers, of cold blue light, dazzling white-outs and howling polar wildernesses.

This “Snow Queen” is decidedly a fairy-tale for grown-ups. Gerda and Kay become an adult couple severed not by death but by trauma that freezes Kay into a mute stupor. As Gerda, Ms Hannigan never sings like a child but instead has a juvenile double who acts out some of her memories. Her lost partner, played by mezzo-soprano Rachael Wilson, likewise has a junior döppelganger. Kay has a further adult double (played by Thomas Grässle), and his role illuminates the extra dimension that Mr Kriegenburg’s staging brings to Mr Abrahamsen’s eerily evocative music.

In the Munich production, Gerda’s search for Kay becomes a metaphor for a loved one’s loss of selfhood. Mr Kriegenburg frames the fairy-tale plot as Gerda’s dream or vision during her worried vigil in a clinic or hospital. Surrounded by a chorus of medics and nurses, the adult Kay (Mr Grässle) lies in a catatonic state. A splinter from the Snow Queen’s demonic mirror, which robs him of feeling, now represents a psychotic breakdown of some sort. By entering the fairy-tale domain, with its monsters, risks and ordeals, Gerda must try to recover the beloved person lost behind his deep-frozen oblivion. This production hints at a schizophrenic event as the source of Kay’s trance-like condition. Audiences might bring to it their own experience of hunting for a loved one’s true self underneath an avalanche of suffering—as a result of dementia, perhaps, depression or addiction.

Ms Hannigan sings Mr Abrahamsen’s quietly moving vocal lines with conviction. He writes passages that make glorious use of the Baroque technique of stile concitato, in which the voice shivers and trembles with uncanny repetitions. Ms Wilson’s Kay crosses the threshold between reality and fantasy; between waking life and a snowbound dreamland. The scene shifts between the spotlit austerity of the clinic, with its almost Wagnerian chorus of nurses adorned with horned head-dresses, and the fantastic quest episodes. Gerda encounters blizzards, tundra, singing crows, an enigmatic Prince and Princess, even a helpful reindeer, in her bid to lift the Snow Queen’s curse. As for the ice-hearted tyrant, he turns out to be an elegant gentleman with a mellow bass voice, commandingly sung by Peter Rose. This urbane, gender-switched despot stands for all the crippling forces and events that may freeze humans’ fragile souls.

Conducted by Cornelius Meister, the Bayerisches Staatsorchester conjure Mr Abrahamsen’s unearthly sounds, his tinkling icicles and billowing snowstorms. A formidable battery of percussion instruments (glockenspiel, vibraphone, xylophone and bells among them) join harp, woodwind and glittering strings. The choruses and arias, meanwhile, rise to moments of sumptuous lyricism that complement the precise, crystalline tone-colours elsewhere.

At the Munich premiere, the medical theme of Mr Kriegenburg’s production divided opinion. Some critics deemed his clinical imagery heavy-handed and intrusive. Your reviewer thought that it could resonate strongly with anyone who has ever sat anxiously beside the bed of a loved one, present in flesh but not in spirit. Ms Hannigan’s performance, and Mr Abrahamsen’s music, won more unanimous plaudits. The composer himself took a bow on the first night. Mr Abrahamsen was born with cerebral palsy, and still walks with a pronounced limp. This is an artist who understands the potential gulf between body and soul, and one whose musical imagination might thaw the most glaciated heart.

“The Snow Queen” is available as video-on-demand from www.staatsoper.tv for 30 days from December 30th 2019