Who, you might be forgiven for asking, was Eugen Engel (1875-1943)? As Orfeo’s excellent booklet explains, he was a Berlin-based businessman trading ‘ladies’ coat fabrics and ready-to-wear fabrics’. His lifelong passion was music, however, and he was well connected in the Berlin music scene in the first decades of the 20th century, before the rise of the Nazis forced him into exile in Holland. He was deported and murdered in the Sobibor extermination camp in March 1943.

Indeed, almost his entire family was murdered by the Nazis. But his daughter got away, to the United States, carrying with her a suitcase crammed with her father’s manuscripts, which remained untouched until after her death in 2006. One of the scores it contained was for Engel’s opera Grete Minde, on which he worked from 1914 until that fateful year of 1933. The production of the work at Theater Magdeburg in early 2022, as captured on this release, was the first time it was heard.

It is based on Theodor Fontane’s short story of the same name, which was converted into a libretto by the journalist and part-time librettist – and, after 1933, enthusiastic Nazi – Hans Bodenstedt. The story tells of free-spirited Grete Minde, who elopes with her lover Valtin to escape the joyless household of her commandeering half-sister Trud in Tangermünde (some 40 miles up the Elbe from Magdeburg).

They get as far as Arendsee (about another 40 miles upriver), where three years later Valtin dies, not before entreating Grete, now mother to a young child, to return home to ask for forgiveness or, if that fails, her inheritance. When she arrives back, however, she is mocked and rejected and, in her desperation, sets the town alight before climbing the church tower, where she and her child perish as the shocked townspeople look on.

It’s certainly a dramatic subject, and Engel sets it with skill and a certain amount of imagination. The booklet suggests a musical language rooted in the tradition of Wagner, Korngold and Strauss, but despite sprinklings of glockenspiel and some adventurous harmonies, the basis seems to me much of the time closer to Weber. The opening scene’s arrival of the Puppeteer (otherwise a somewhat superfluous element in the drama) is reminiscent of Pagliacci.

As is perhaps to be expected, then, Engel’s musical language is derivative, but he’s still a highly skilled composer and the score has some attractive moments – the end of Act 2 builds up some tragic weight, for example, while the incorporation of church music in Act 3 is also highly effective. And the drama itself leaves an impression, even if there’s little in the music that’s truly memorable. A rediscovered masterpiece? No, but a fascinating record of an entirely forgotten composer.

This is likely to remain the work’s only recording, and happily the Magdeburg forces, persuasively conducted by Anna Skryleva, do it proud. It’s a fine achievement from an ensemble cast, with Raffaela Lintl’s Grete a vivid, believable creation, and Zoltán Nyári an attractively sung Valtin. Kristi Anna Isene and Marko Pantelić are suitably unflinching as Trud and her husband, Gerdt. Among the other singers, Karina Repova stands out for her powerful and affecting Mother Superior.