The conductor of this recording, Bruno Weil, feels that the spoken dialogue in Der Freischütz is weak, and he has accordingly replaced it with a commentary delivered by Samiel, the Black Huntsman himself. The author of the commentary, Steffen Kopetzky, does not share Weil’s view of Friedrich Kind’s text (‘not as bad as it is made out to be…his approach is dramatically perfect’) and neither, of course, did Weber. Since Kopetzky’s contribution is not a narration, more a quasi-philosophical interrupted monologue (‘He who lives between all lives nowhere. He must constantly turn round, must see where he has room for this turning around his own axis’, whatever all that may mean), the plot is obscured.

All stage directions are excised from the printed libretto, so it is by no means clear who, for example, Kaspar is addressing when he begins his aria ‘Silence, silence, so that no one notices you’ (his drinking song has already been robbed of menace and meaning by the absence of the dialogue preceding and punctuating it). The climactic exchanges before the Act 3 finale are replaced by a windy soliloquy from Samiel. No wonder that the performance seems so half-hearted: another function of those dialogues is to provide motivation for the sung numbers that follow them; one cannot blame Christoph Prégardien for singing ‘Durch die Wälder’ lyrically but with little sense of Max’s predicament at that point.

Most of the singers are affected to some degree by this conversion of Der Freischütz into an oratorio: both Agathe’s arias are given modest, small-scale readings (Petra Maria Schnitzer’s voice is pretty, but not large); Aennchen has some charm though not much character, but in her first arietta she is not helped by Weil’s slightly heavy hand, nor in her second by a hoarse viola obbligato. The orchestra is of period instruments, and I am grateful for the restoration of the all-important natural horn sonorities and for the absence of late-Romantic rhetoric. But not for much else: I had not thought that the Wolf’s Glen scene could be so woefully tame (the casual, almost conversational evocation of Samiel doesn’t help), and elsewhere alongside orchestral textures that often remind you that Weber shared far more of his lifetime with Haydn than with Wagner, too many pages are slack, heavy or under-characterised. None of those adjectives is authentic to Weber.