Pity Albert Lortzing. Sacked from his theatre post in Leipzig, he re-established himself in Vienna only to be forced out after backing the wrong side in the 1848 revolution, and then died of exhaustion in 1851, aged just 49. He suffered from rheumatism, too. You wouldn’t guess it from the score of Der Waffenschmied, the comic opera that he wrote in 1846 for the Theater an der Wien and which is currently (or so Wikipedia says, and I can believe it) Lortzing’s third most popular opera.

It’s big-hearted and effortlessly melodious, with a mixture of arias, strophic songs and ensembles (as well as the statutory anvil chorus) that adds up to something more musically coherent than a Singspiel, although Der Waffenschmied does have spoken dialogue (omitted on this recording). The story is simple enough. We’re in the Rhineland in the 16th century, where the armourer Stadinger’s daughter Marie is in love with both the noble Count Liebenau (whom Stadinger dislikes) and the journeyman Konrad (of whom he approves). Neither father nor daughter has at any point realised that Konrad is actually the Count in disguise.

If you can buy that, you’ll get a lot of enjoyment from this utterly harmless opera. Those who know Zar und Zimmermann will recognise Der Waffenschmied as only marginally less inspired, and those who don’t can picture something in the vein of Nicolai or the lighter Weber. The two young lovers ostensibly drive the plot, and both the singers in this new recording are perfectly plausible. Miriam Kutrowatz is bright, nimble and sweet-sounding as Marie, and Timothy Connor, as Liebenau, sings stylishly and phrases nicely. They both blend well in Lortzing’s various (often highly inventive) ensembles.

But the opera really centres around the title character of Stadinger, whose lilting final song ‘Auch ich war ein Jüngling’ stopped the show back in 1846, prompting Lortzing to write additional verses by way of encore. We get five verses here, and Günther Groissböck sings them beautifully. His is one of those bass voices that you can roll over your tongue like a good claret, and he brings warmth as well as an unforced style that elevates every scene in which he appears.

Whether that, in itself, makes this recording recommendable (and it’s certainly not unrecommendable) is another matter. Der Waffenschmied has a decent discography and John Tomlinson’s wonderfully vivid Stadinger (Profil, 3/05) would probably edge it for me. This anniversary concert performance from the opera’s birthplace – the Theater an der Wien – benefits from affectionate and unfussy conducting from Leo Hussain. Alas, the sound is congested and sometimes muddy, particularly in the bass range, and the chorus, in particular, lacks impact.

This is a live recording, and although there’s almost no discernible audience noise, neither is there much sense of a theatrical occasion. Still, many will find its small-house ensemble atmosphere truer to the spirit of the piece than (say) the beefy, over-engineered slickness of the 1964 EMI Munich version with Hermann Prey. Anyway, full marks to Capriccio for providing a libretto. Slightly fewer marks for an English translation that seems to have been cut and pasted, unedited, from Google Translate.