‘My dear Richard! Here you have your Tauber-Lied!!’ scribbled Franz Lehár on the score of ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz’, the showstopping Act 2 tenor aria from his 1929 operetta Das Land des Lächelns. The point endures: this was conceived as Richard Tauber’s show. Lehár was writing for both the voice and the superstar charisma of one of the greatest singers of his era. For today’s operetta fan, chance would be a fine thing.

So a release like this is enough to prompt tears of gratitude. If you own Piotr Beczała’s 2014 Tauber tribute album, you’ll have dreamed of hearing him sing the complete role of Prince Sou Chong; and now here he is, in this radiantly performed and gloriously stylish Zurich Opera production from Andreas Homoki. Let me say at the outset that this is a magnificent achievement: a staging that lets the piece speak eloquently for itself, performed with a sense of style that’s faithful without being patronising.

Homoki’s approach is to ground Das Land des Lächelns in the aesthetic of its own time. Orientalism is confined to Sou Chong’s yellow jacket and the glittering red cheongsams of Wolfgang Gussmann and Susana Mendoza’s costume designs. Instead, the visuals evoke a Hollywood musical of the early ’30s: top hats, tails and a sweeping Busby Berkeley staircase on a gleaming black and gold art deco sound stage. The curtain closes to separate public display from private emotion – a central theme of this culture-clash tragedy, heightened by the mask that Sou Chong wears in his official capacity.

I found the puppet-theatre styling of Homoki’s Gramophone Award-winning Wozzeck alienating but here the artificiality concentrates the emotion. You see the precise instant when Mi (a sparky, sunny Rebeca Olvera) and Gustl (Spencer Lang, a properly dapper comic tenor) realise that their love is hopeless; before then we’ve witnessed Beczała and his Lisa (Julia Kleiter) in a savagely sincere Act 2 finale. Kleiter’s singing has a really glamorous gleam throughout; together with Beczała the pair articulate their emotional conflict as painfully and as persuasively as if they’re singing Puccini. Beczała’s ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz’ is as wrenching as you’d hope; the pair’s earlier love scenes have a weightless delicacy and tenderness.

For that, of course, much credit has to go to Fabio Luisi, who brings out textures ranging from Straussian lushness to Ravel-like chinoiserie and lets the music breathe and flow, delivering Viennese Schwung as required but also a sense of line and a passionate urgency that evokes Turandot and Rosenkavalier by turns. If there’s been a more ravishingly played new operetta recording this century, I haven’t heard it. Reservations? Well, Homoki cuts almost all the spoken dialogue and several minor characters. I’m uneasy with a concept that erases Lehár’s librettists – all three of whom died under Nazi persecution – from their own work; it also creates non sequiturs in the narrative, and reduces Mi and Gustl’s relationship to little more than a couple of comic duets. Homoki elides the three acts, and the English subtitles are stiff and riddled with typos. There are a couple of minor intonation wobbles.

But by telling the story almost entirely through the musical numbers, Homoki shapes a drama whose emotional directness will astonish those who think Lehár was a mere purveyor of escapism, and which should make new friends for this troubling, genuinely moving masterpiece of Lehár’s gorgeous late period. Operetta lovers, meanwhile, could hardly hope for a finer modern account.