The only explanation for Alfred is that it was a practice opera. Dvořák's first attempt in the medium, it was written around 1870, 30 years before Rusalka, to an often-used German libretto that wasn’t about to bring a greater Czech presence to the Provisional Theatre. Dvořák seems not to have made any great effort to get the piece performed.

Karl Theodor Körner’s libretto gave Dvořák a range of operatic clichés in a plot about warring ninth-century Danes and Brits (with a maiden caught in between) which allowed the composer to echo, in various ways, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. The former is reflected in a seemingly endless 15 minute Overture as well as an aria that wants to be ‘O du mein holder Abendstern’; the latter showed Dvořák the kind of ensembles needed in a pageantry-heavy plot. This first-ever recording makes you wonder if the composer’s operatic laboratory should have been kept private. A healthy academic interest is valid, though a better performance than this one is called for.

Oddly, Alfred mildly contradicts the conventional wisdom that Dvořák’s operas suffer from lyricism over rhetoric. In fact, it is almost nothing but non-stop pronouncements and isn’t very melodic at all, but has any number of well-sustained dramatic arcs. With great ingenuity, Dvořák heightens the operatic tension of any given scene by postponing a long-promised harmonic resolution in endlessly clever ways, maintaining further continuity with segues into the next dramatic event. Yet other moments have scenes ending without any proper sense of conclusion. Among the opera’s many hot-headed confrontations between vaguely differentiated characters, the choral music is a cut above the rest and deserves to be heard: this is where the opera gains dramatic specificity and a more individualistic harmonic personality.

Conductor Heiko Mathias Förster deserves praise for revealing the vitality of the piece in a live performance where the performing forces wouldn’t make anybody’s A list. The cast maintain dramatic tension in some stamina-testing scenes but this recording doesn’t make you want to seek them out in the future. The orchestra sounds pretty thin. Still, the opera’s nature is quite apparent – as the missing piece of Dvořák’s creative progression.

The booklet promises an online libretto in German, Czech and English and is good to its word at arcodiva.cz.