With the Deutsche Oper Berlin’s 2023 staging of Antikrist, Rued Langgaard’s only opera received arguably its highest-profile production since it was first staged in 1999. It’s a lavish show, with striking, cartoonish designs by Ersan Mondtag, who also directs and designed (with Annika Liu) the garish, ghoulish costumes.

Here, such characters as The Great Whore and The Scarlet Beast truly are the stuff of nightmares, while almost everyone on stage – and with extensive use of dancers, there are plenty of people – wears either bodysuits daubed with impressionistic appendages or exaggerated courtly outfits that make them look like spinning tops. The Deutsche Oper, singing the work in German, fields a strong cast, largely drawn from its ensemble: Thomas Lehman’s powerful Lucifer and Irene Roberts’s impressively and often beautifully sung The Spirit of Mystery stand out among a group of singers fearless in tackling the composer’s demanding and – one imagines – rarely rewarding vocal writing. The orchestra under conductor Stephan Zilias are no less impressive, and they play Langgaard’s score – often striking, often disarmingly beautiful – superbly.

Guy Rickards voiced disbelief at the Danish Royal Theatre’s initial rejection of the opera when reviewing that theatre’s eventual performance on DVD nearly 20 years ago (Dacapo, 12/05). And musically, indeed, there’s a great deal to marvel at, even if the final chorus leaves me somewhat underwhelmed. But Langgaard’s libretto – the reason for the official rejection both in its original version and the revised version performed here – is clearly problematic. It cobbles together texts from various sources with little apparent concern for coherence; a series of allegorical characters hold forth but barely interact. As drama it’s far from convincing.

Mondtag, one feels, senses this and does what he can to spice things up, not least by showing us the Antichrist (played by an unnamed actor), who is kept absent by Langgaard. Here we witness him being born out of the primordial slime and dressed by Lucifer and his minions; later his vast naked likeness is hanged from the flies. But for all its visual inventiveness (including choreography by Rob Fordeyn), I’m not sure how much Mondtag’s staging helps the piece, trying to imbue it with a sense of horror and the grotesque that seems removed from both Langgaard’s music and the somewhat nostalgic premise of the opera.

Any new version of so rarely recorded a work is welcome. And although this enterprising production – vividly filmed –does little to persuade a sceptic of Antikrist’s viability as drama, it certainly leaves one freshly convinced of the individuality of Langgaard’s voice and the undeniable power of his conviction.