Offenbach’s Die Rheinnixen has been more referred to than heard, most particularly because it was the source of what later became the Barcarolle in Les contes d’Hoffmann. Last July the Montpellier Festival performed the work for the first time since 1864, and that concert performance is here recorded live, with audience applause sensibly restricted to the end of each act.

Offenbach composed the music to a French text as Les fées du Rhin; but it was written specifically for the Vienna Court Opera and is sung here in German, too. A fully-fledged German Romantic opera in the tradition of Weber, Marschner and early Wagner, it is set in the Rhineland in 1522, during the peasants’ uprising against their feudal masters. Conrad and Franz arrive among a regiment of mercenary soldiers. Conrad had long ago seduced and abandoned Hedwig, and her daughter Armgard was Franz’s sweetheart before he lost his memory as a result of injury. Armgard’s constant singing (pre-echoes of Antonia’s mother in Hoffmann!) leads to her being carried off by the fairies; but she is finally reunited with Franz. Such are the bones of the libretto – no better, but maybe no worse, than other Romantic operas of the time.

As for the music, it reveals once more a composer who found his greatest success in frivolities but who, as Hoffmann has always confirmed, wrote naturally and confidently on a larger scale. Two particular problems perhaps face the listener approaching it. In the first place the opera is over-long. In 1864 Offenbach cut back savagely, though not always where he would have wished. The tenor Aloys Ander, singing the soldier Franz, was ill and unable to learn his role properly. The duet for Franz and Armgard in the final act is one of the magnificent stretches of music heard for the first time in Montpellier.

The second problem is that the Hoffmann Barcarolle has become so famous (dare one say hackneyed?) that it may be difficult to accept it in its earlier existence as a chorus of elves. The same goes for the ‘grande valse’ that Offenbach composed for his ballet Le papillon and reused here as a fairy ballet, and which after his death became hugely popular as an apache dance.

Far less worrying is the appearance, as a drinking song for Conrad and the mercenaries, of what later became Hoffmann’s Drinking Song in the Giulietta act of Hoffmann. There is much more magnificent music – rousing choruses for the mercenaries, an Act 1 conclusion built around a patriotic song that Offenbach had composed in 1849, a beautiful solo for Franz, the aforementioned big duet for Armgard and Franz, and another for Conrad and Hedwig. The performance has the feel of a concert performance, its most impressive singing coming in the honeyed tenor of Piotr Beczala. Regina Schörg, Naxos’s Donna Elvira, has impressive high notes but sounds at times a shade tentative. Supporting roles are impressively sung.

Altogether the opera is greatly worth hearing. It may not have been Offenbach’s greatest triumph, but it is surely so for Jean-Christophe Keck, who so tirelessly restored the score as part of his ongoing edition of Offenbach’s works.