Heinrich Marschner’s evident heroes were Mozart, Beethoven and Weber (whom he attempted to succeed at the Dresden Court Theatre in 1826) – composers who wanted drama to be at least as important as singing. To this new German music theatre Marschner (1795-1861) added contemporary Romantic subject matter: vampires and undeads (Der Vampyr), nostalgic medieval chivalry (Der Templer und die Jüdin, after Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe) and the anguish of a fairy (here a dwarf king) who attempts to marry a mortal (Hans Heiling, his greatest success).

‘Influenced by’ is hardly an adequate description of the two-handed helpings Wagner gave himself from Hans Heiling’s libretto (by Eduard Devrient, later a colleague of the younger composer’s in Dresden), score, scoring and dramaturgy. Heiling, the king, is an Alberich/Holländer seeking to escape his underground domain and buy himself an innocent, country, mortal bride. She (Anna) is loved by the poor Konrad, a rather colourless hunter with lots of difficult, top-of-the-stave, florid singing to negotiate (Erik next stop). Heiling’s mother, the Queen of the Earth Spirits, negotiates a difficult path between her son’s leaving-home ambitions and her innate sympathy for mortal love. In a major scene in Act 2 she warns off Anna in music that sounds like an early sketch for Brünnhilde’s Todesverkündigung in Die Walküre (Wagner’s ‘du sahst der Walküre sehrenden Blick’ is virtually note-for-note Heiling) and at the end of Act 3 she puts a stop to Heiling’s final attempt to woo Anna with a Berlioz-like arioso well remembered by both Senta and Venus.

Marschner, however, remained bound by conventional forms; his scenes inevitably fall into the expected duets and trios that (as Wagner saw) can often dissipate dramatic tension. Nonetheless, it’s a score worthy of serious studio and stage attention. The performance captured here is attractively cast, with Werba (this year’s Salzburg Papageno), Antonacci (familiar here through her Glyndebourne Handel) and Fontana especially fluent and confident of voice and language, Wulkopf a mistress of the fine line between a mother’s interference and sentimentality, and Lippert’s negotiation of his tricky tessitura only interrupted by frequent looks at the conductor.

Unfortunately, Pier Luigi Pizzi’s one-man-band production – he designed as well – just does not ‘do’ characterisation (Heiling is a particular victim here, in a part which must carry the spookiness, charisma and angst of a Flying Dutchman), limiting itself to moving bodies around his retro-1970s polystyrene rocks set. Maestro Palumbo (just appointed as Christian Thielemann’s successor at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper) and his accurate and youthful players warm up as the evening progresses but there’s little sense of Romantic German style. The sound is fine, the video direction primitive and singer-centred. But, despite reservations, this remains an essential purchase for the work and its place in operatic history.