It seems that Sternengebot has not been staged since 1944 (Stuttgart), and I would be surprised if this recording of a 1999 concert performance does much to improve its prospects of revival. The performance as such is mixed in quality: but the main problem is with the work itself.
Sternengebot (1908) was Siegfried Wagner’s fifth opera in 10 years, and the third to be premiered in Hamburg. The plot is a late-medieval mish-mash of love, duty and magical mayhem, with a libretto by the composer whose reliance on the cliches of German romantic opera is well-matched by cliche-ridden music. Lohengrin and Tannhauser are the main sources, with Tristan and Meistersinger in support, but all so diluted and sanitised as to suggest the most debilitating family piety.
Like his slightly later Schwarzschwanenreich (Marco Polo, 11/95) Sternengebot suffers from the composer’s failure to realise that he was best suited to the kind of folk-like, fast-moving material (learned from his principal teacher Humperdinck) that predominated in his first success, Der Barenhauter (1898). In Sternengebot the no-nonsense processional music of the second act, the mock ballad for the villain and the general atmosphere of blood and thunder are far more convincing than the elevated emoting of the solemn, saintly aristocrats about whose fates we are supposed to care as deeply as the composer evidently did.
If Siegfried Wagner had found himself a Hugo von Hofmannsthal instead of persisting in the composition of his own texts (Strauss was bringing Elektra to completion at the time of Sternengebot) he might have earned longer-lasting success. But the combination of an operatic culture eager for conventional novelties and the immense reputation of his father (as well as the cachet of his close involvement with the Bayreuth Festival) gave him the opportunity to produce another 13 stage works before his death in 1930, with little time for self-critical reflection.
This performance has the advantage of an effectively villainous baritone in Andre Wenhold, and the tenor Volker Horn does sterling, occasionally stentorian work in the impossible role of the tortured, heroically self-denying Helferich (which just happened to be the librettist/composer’s second Christian name). The female contingent fare less well, with a good deal of shrill and unstable tone from both the principal sopranos. The recording of the voices is satisfactory, but the orchestral sound is too recessed and generalised, so that one of the composer’s virtues, his well-calculated, nicely varied orchestration, goes for too little. As the President of the International Siegfried Wagner Society, Albert conducts as if every bar were cherishable, but I fear that all too few collectors – even among German opera completists – will greatly cherish this recording