Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, set against the background of the aftermath of the First World War, was premiered in 1925 and, for all the work’s undoubted structural brilliance, I’ve never enjoyed listening to it on CD. Nor do I have positive recollections of a performance I saw at Covent Garden in the ’60s or early ’70s, which is odd, as I see from the Royal Opera House’s invaluable online performance database that the title-role was most likely played by Geraint Evans, most of whose operatic endeavours from that era gleam in my memory.

So I approached English National Opera’s new look at the work with a degree of trepidation, determined to view it as 21st-century drama and to let the music work or not without attempting to analyse it too deeply.

And I have to say that, as drama, Carrie Cracknell’s opera directing debut is remarkably successful. Berg created his own libretto by adapting Georg Büchner’s powerful play Woyzeck, which is itself loosely based on the real-life story of a hairdresser from Leipzig who returned from soldiering in the 1790s and, in a fit of jealousy, killed his lover, who had a weakness for soldiers.

The story is timeless and Cracknell, a well-regarded avant-garde theatre director, has placed her Wozzeck in the quite unpleasant here and now – and it works. This Wozzeck will have seen recent active service in Iraq and/or Afghanistan and it has left its scars, the extent of with which society has yet fully to come to terms. Recent research has established that former soldiers returning from these two war zones are very considerably more prone to psychological disorder, violent and irrational behaviour. All war is brutalising and dehumanising with its own madness – the hordes of troops in the trenches being sent over the top in Berg’s own era, the excesses in the conflicts of today. No wonder soldiers who, as in the real-life Woyzeck’s case, may have enlisted to escape problems at home, will have difficulty readjusting to civilian life.

And I found completely real the horrific flashbacks and post-traumatic stress disorder of this Wozzeck, played by Leigh Melrose, albeit elements of the staging were unnecessarily fussy. Wozzeck’s inability to control his emotions, the growing jealousy, when Marie, the mother of his son, has a fling with an unpleasant Drum Major (Bryan Register), has an immediate resonance and impact. And thus, gripped by the unfolding drama, I was drawn inextricably into Berg’s powerfully involving musical web.

Berg’s characters can be just subtly larger than life – Tom Randle portrayed the ridiculous Captain brilliantly and James Morris’s self-important Doctor, who uses Wozzeck for his ludicrous ‘research’, feeding him on a diet of beans and refusing to let him pee, while caring for him not a jot, was a frightening parody of the pompous army doctor. But the vocal glory of Cracknell’s production lies in the Marie of American soprano Sara Jakubiak, making her ENO debut, whose powerful and dramatic voice coped thrillingly with Berg’s fiendish line. Meanwhile the ENO orchestra was on heat, as good as I’ve heard them, coaxed to rare heights by Edward Gardner, building to an intense frenzy for the orchestra’s long single note crescendo at the opera’s climactic moment. This was a sensational performance.

To set a work from the 1920s in the present day is a bold move, but this is an opera that justifies the approach. I thought it worked brilliantly, both dramatically and musically. I have listened afterwards to recordings by Abbado and Dohnányi, but neither can match the impact of this stage representation. This is real theatre and must be seen in the theatre. I should add that this is one opera where ENO’s policy of performing in the vernacular (the English translation was by Richard Stokes) pays rich dividends. I found the unfamiliar English translation of ENO’s recent revival of La bohème unhelpful, but the impact of this Wozzeck would have been lessened had it been performed in German.

The operatic canon is stuffed with 18th- and 19th-century offerings; the majority of the 20th century’s (Britten the most substantial exception) from the earlier part. Wozzeck comes from that era, but this truly came across as a genuine 21st-century masterpiece. The corrupting influences of war, the inevitable long-term suffering of its participants and the universal deprivation of the poor – the messages are as redolent now as they have ever been.