Merlin followed The Queen of Sheba, still Goldmark’s best-known opera, to a successful premiere (1886) at the Hofoper in Vienna – a city where, despite his Jewish descent, the composer was known as both a champion of Wagner and a friend of Brahms. Goldmark’s diverse selection of opera subjects went on to include A Winter’s Tale, Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen and Charles Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth. So it’s not at all unpredictable that his take on “The Matter of Britain” would focus on Merlin’s conflict between love and power rather than on another droopy Lancelot and Guinevere romance.

A libretto with victory speeches and revelations of treachery aplenty, and a magical champion who predicts victory but cannot take the field himself, could have led musically to retro-Grand Operatic bluster or to mere imitation of earlier models. These dangers are avoided. Goldmark’s fresh, Weber-ish melodic gift and his uses of recitative with a verismo pace and of carefully placed, ear-bending modulations set Merlin in an intriguing post-Parsifal world. Certainly its scoring catches something of that Wagner work’s “lit from behind” transparency and matches its lack of irrelevant orchestral punch. In addition, the beau role of Viviane, Merlin’s nemesis but love (created by Wagner’s first Kundry and taken here by a most dramatically aware Anna Gabler), has a musical profile of real individuality, never quite proceeding melodically or harmonically as you might expect.

The Philharmonie Festiva is a selection of players from leading Munich orchestras based on Karl Richter’s old Munich Bach Orchestra. They play fluently for the sympathetic championship of Gerd Schaller. The chorus-work is sharp. The male casting is uneven, not as firmly established in their notes or characterisations as Gabler’s Viviane or Popescu’s Morgana. Profil’s establishment of this rare opera – they claim a premiere recording of the 1886 Urfassung – would have been helped if their libretto had translations or track numbers. But, whatever small reservations one may have, it’s an opera worth hearing, far removed from being just another Romantic byway.