Though Strauss worked feverishly to be frivolous in so many of his later works and often created fascinating operatic hybrids, Die schweigsame Frau never found its legs. Though the collaboration with librettist Stefan Zweig (based on the Ben Jonson play The Silent Woman) was among Strauss’s happiest, the Dresden premiere was politically fraught. Zweig was Jewish and the year was 1935, leaving the composer to predict that the opera would succeed ‘if only in the 21st century’.

Now in that very century, the opera appears rarely and with a variety of cuts, as in this new studio recording based on what conductor Frank Beermann calls ‘the Dresden version’ that he believes contracts the opera so seamlessly that he wonders if Strauss half expected the cuts to happen. Beermann restores an entire choral ensemble scene in Act 2 but some 20 minutes’ worth of cuts remain, many falling under the heading of ‘more of the same’. Wolfgang Sawallisch’s live 1971 set on Orfeo is even 20 minutes shorter than Beermann.

Strauss’s sense of theatrical timing does indeed seem compromised, as if he was having such a grand time writing it that he didn’t want to let it go. The final curtain goes on for ever. Passages that were so witty in other operas are repeated and elongated. Thus the score is a strange combination of Strauss forgetting what he knew and falling back on what he had already done.

Instead of giving a well-investigated look at the score and dramatic content, the Chemnitz production keeps objective distance in an opera whose characters must be fully inhabited if they are to acquire any operatic reality. The voices in this new set are quite fine: Julia Bauer is the equal of any in the title-role and Franz Hawlata as Morosus has the kind of baritone sound that readily reveals the character’s painful, old-age isolation. But if one is going to pay for three discs in a version of the opera that could fit on two, why not go for the three-disc uncut EMI set conducted by Marek Janowski featuring the wonderfully baritonal Theo Adam? Or get to know the opera in English in the live 1961 Rudolf Kempe/Covent Garden set?