That it took a Bohemian Jew to bring Germany’s foundational drama of nationhood to the lyric stage was an irony probably not lost on Jaromír Weinberger himself. Just as English composers have fought shy of writing Shakespeare operas, so the closest that native Romantic composers came to setting Schiller was in the emerging genre of concert overtures such as The Bride of Messina by Ries and Schumann; they would leave the mountain to be climbed by a select few foreigners including Rossini with William Tell and Tchaikovsky with The Maid of Orleans. Only Verdi was up to the challenge of a sustained engagement undertaken from 1845 (Giovanna d’Arco) to 1867 (Don Carlo), and even he passed up Schiller’s trilogy of history plays about a brilliant general of fatally over-reaching ambition. The first Wallenstein opera was written in 1876 by (of all people) Luigi Denza, he of ‘Funiculì, funiculà’.

The composer of Schwanda the Bagpiper is, on the surface of it, a scarcely more plausible candidate for doing justice to an epic historical tragedy which ran to 10 hours when Peter Stein produced it complete in 2007. Condensed to a little over a fifth of that length by Weinberger, his librettist Miloš Kareš and Max Brod, the back-translator of this German version, the opera suffers from a pervasive sense of strain in several directions. The focal point of Schiller’s prologue (Wallenstein’s Camp, the subject of a vivid tone-poem by Weinberger’s countryman Smetana) is a moral tirade against Wallenstein’s plundering troops delivered by a capuchin monk. On CD, he’s just another angry bass. To the title-figure is granted an ‘Uneasy lies the head’ monologue of crumbling power, but it arrives too early in the piece and is over before Wallenstein or our understanding of him can develop through its course; here is no Henry IV, or for that matter Wotan or Boris, even if they cast fleeting shadows over both music and text.

At the opera’s first run of only four performances in Vienna, November 1937, critics turned Weinberger’s very versatility against him, and it is tempting to share their reservations over a score that jumps neurotically from scene to scene and even phrase to phrase between military pomp and parody, orchestrally stripped-back visions of Korngold and Puccini, and the operetta style that was the composer’s stock-in-trade, largely reserved here for the romantic subplot which falls short of counterbalancing a preponderance of plotting and barking generalissimi.

Just over a year later, Weinberger sought to put aesthetic clear water between himself and Alban Berg, just as he had done physically by emigrating to the US: ‘He was a composer of decadence. I am a composer of the past … This time, the time in which we are living, has nothing to say to me and I do not expect it ever to say anything.’ Yet a further irony is that Wallenstein belongs to its time as wholly as Lulu, premiered in Berlin five months earlier. How literally it may be read as an allegory (Albrecht Wallenstein as Engelbert Dollfuss, decorated soldier, reformer and dictator, eventually murdered by those professing loyalty to the higher authority of the Emperor/Hitler) remains open to question, but Weinberger’s dedication of the opera to Kurt Schuschnigg, Dollfuss’s successor, does not. Neither does the Nazis’ construction of Buchenwald on the very site of Wallenstein’s camp earlier that year.

In the Schiller anniversary year of 2009, a staged revival in Gera obtained international attention; this one-off concert performance (recorded without applause) hits and misses the mark much like Wallenstein itself. The most compelling portrayal comes from Roman Trekel in the title-role, and he does a passable Tauber imitation in the fifth of the opera’s six scenes (‘Komm an mein Herz’) when Weinberger snaps into operetta mode. In the part of the general’s daughter Thekla, Martina Welschenbach sings attractively until the part climbs high above the stave, which is often enough to provoke discomfort all round. Dagmar Schellenberger stands out as the scheming Countess Terzky, but too many of the large supporting cast are indistinguishably dry and declamatory where juicier voices are needed. Chorus, orchestra and conductor all deserve credit for bringing conviction and a modicum of coherence to a tricky and intermittently absorbing piece.