Hermann Wolfgang von Waltershausen was a scion of the aristocratic Sartorius/Waltershausen clan whose home lies near Göttingen, where he was born in 1882, but he studied with Ludwig Thuille in Munich and lived there until his death in 1954, two decades after the Nazis had relieved him of the directorship of the city’s Academy of Music. He wrote his fifth opera, Die Gräfin von Tolosa, in 1937 and then ceased composing. Oberst Chabert was his second and in his lifetime his most successful, with over 100 productions worldwide in the 20 years after its Frankfurt premiere in January 1912.

So why haven’t we heard of him? Richard Strauss seems not to have conducted any of Waltershausen’s music; nor Furtwängler, apart from a solitary performance of the Krippenmusik (one of very few works to have entered the record catalogues). Did they know something? Then there’s the subject matter. In Colonel Chabert, or The Woman with Two Husbands, Balzac invents the return of one of Napoleon’s officers who had served at Eylau in 1807, and pursues Chabert’s bitter quest to recover his life and his wife after being given up for dead on the battlefield.

In three taut acts, Waltershausen treats his source very freely indeed, losing much satirical intent along the way but retaining the mise en scène in clumsy detail: the Balzacian stage directions must have been a producer’s nightmare. Modern successors might effectively set the piece in the aftermath of other killing fields such as Kosovo. They should try, because if it lacks the hits of Der Rosenkavalier (1911) or La fanciulla del West (1912), Oberst Chabert is at least as worthy of revival as Schreker’s Der ferne Klang (1912). Waltershausen knows his Ring and Elektra but he doesn’t ride on their style. Act 2 and indeed the whole opera turns on the swearing (or not) of an oath, with accusations of perjury and betrayal hurtling across the stage like Wagnerian time-bombs, before a reflective quintet, which is sustained by a cussed, Pfitzner-like determination to impale each character on the horns of a dilemma. But Pfitzner can be spacious to a fault, whereas the extravagant modulations of Oberst Chabert flit between moods with manic, over-scored agitation: Strauss knew better where to draw with two lines, not 10.

CPO presents a live recording from what the booklet photos show to be a semi-staging at the Deutsche Oper. The lawyer Derville and his two assistants make a characterful trio, and Manuela Uhl warms up towards an impassioned account of Rosine’s death and transfiguration (which Waltershausen invents: surely Balzac would have hated it). Everyone deserves credit, but the piece itself deserves a full staging and a recording with larger, fuller voices, directed with more time and weight and sweep. I was reminded of the late Michael Oliver and his enthusiasm for certain kinds of rarity and revival. He would have enjoyed the seriousness of purpose, the lack of compromise about Walterhausen’s opera, and I hope you will too.