Man's relationship to Nature was a theme that preoccupied the Romantic era, especially in Germany. The Undine legend—the water-sprite who seeks contact with humanity, only to be bitterly disillusioned—can be traced back to at least the sixteenth century, but was given new life at the start of the nineteenth (a misprint in the booklet—one of many, unfortunately—gets this a century wrong) by de la Motte Fouque, who also provided a libretto on the subject for E. T. A. Hoffmann's opera Undine. This was hailed by Weber as ''one of the most brilliant works with which our age has endowed us''.
Nearly 30 years later Lortzing, who had had successes with Zar und Zimmermann and Der Wildschutz, wrote an Undine to his own libretto, though confessing that he did not feel at ease in this style (hence the numerous revisions he later made). In his hands it took on a more bourgeois tinge, and he was persuaded to give the work a happy ending—which provided a spectacular stage effect (when Undine and her fickle knight Hugo are united in a love-death at the bottom of the sea) though making Hugo's behaviour dramatically implausible. Lortzing's melodic facility makes for agreeable, easy-on-the-ear music, indebted to folk-song (as in Veit's ''Vater, Mutter''), to Weber and to Mozart (as can be heard in Hugo's aria at the start of Act 4), and there is some use of leitmotif: his orchestration is extremely skilful and interesting. Lapses into numbers of popular appeal or dialogue (of which there is a lot, particularly in Act 1), however, tend to weaken the musicodramatic tension.
There was once, I remember, a 'highlights' LP of Undine with Anny Schlemm in the title-role (DG—nla), but here for the first time, I believe, is the whole opera; and the high quality of the performance, which originated in the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, does much to compensate for the work's flaws. The 81-year-old Kurt Eichhorn conducts with great spirit and draws admirably clean and well-proportioned playing from the excellent Cologne Radio Orchestra, and the chorus work is first rate. The men in the cast are all good. Protschka we know as an accomplished artist who has developed from purely lyrical roles into heavier parts, and he makes the most of Hugo's big scene in Act 4; Janssen, a young Dutchman who has made a considerable reputation in Munich, shows a splendidly focused voice as the Prince of the Waters, whose desire to discover whether men are better than spirits (who have no souls) leads to such disastrous results; and Kruse is efficient as Veit, if sounding rather high-class for a mere squire.
The two leading female parts are less impressively taken: in the title-role, Monika Krause has an attractive tone, but it is a pity about the insistent beat in her voice; Christiane Hampe is well differentiated from her, though she too could be steadier at times. In the editing process too long a gap has been left between the ends of musical numbers and the ensuing dialogues; but these latter have been well produced, and the addition to the catalogue of this significant work of German romanticism is to be welcomed.'