The sailor who fell from grace with the sea made pretty shocking reading for this listener as a teenager, prompted to investigate Yukio Mishima’s novella by the broadcast premiere of Henze’s ninth opera from the Deutsche Oper in Berlin in May 1990. The erotic opulence of Das verratene Meer came as another shock of its own – the electrical storm of Mishima’s prose, even in translation, illuminating the troubled waters of Henze’s score. Class study of The Lord of the Flies might have prepared me for a tale of boys running amok with lethal consequences but not for the Oedipal repressed passion of the young and fatherless Noboru.

Like his 1960 opera Der Prinz von Homburg, the piece subverts the idealisation of a heroic death. Both pieces seem to reflect on the shortcomings of a brutal and militarised society and the potentially fatal consequences of rebellion; this from a composer who recognised his homosexuality from early on and whose father enrolled him in the Hitler Youth. The casts of both operas are necessarily male-dominated, and even more than in the recent Capriccio album of Homburg, staged in Stuttgart (see 11/20), Vera-Lotte Böcker proves herself an outstanding exponent of Henze’s demandingly expressionist writing for the soprano voice as Noboru’s mother Fusako.

Henze casts 13-year-old Noburo and his violent little friends as adults, flattening the generational conflict and heightening the boy’s Oedipal obsession with his mother. The gang’s ritual killing of an animal at the climax of Part 1 – a test of nerve that becomes a practice run for the hapless sailor – occupies the same expressive space as Noboru’s previous, wide-eyed interrogation of Ryuji’s adventures on the high seas. Bo Skovhus has his most lyrical moments as Ryuji in the second scene when he sings: ‘When I saw the sea for the first time, I began to dream.’

Simone Young, free from the balance constraints of a conventionally staged performance, unleashes the full force of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, the violence of its outbursts all the more powerful for the tautness of its control. Her focus is ferocious, and she never lets the players slacken for an instant. The presentation is superb, with a full account of the opera’s different versions, its complex chronology and its significance, as well as a full libretto and translation.