When Wagner remarked of Carl Loewe in 1875 that ‘there is a serious German master’, he was more likely thinking of the ballads than Gutenberg, which is one of few precedents for this oratorio, composed the following year by Ludwig Meinardus (1827-96). Friedrich Nohr had exercised himself on the subject in 1849, and Bernhard Schick’s Luther in Erfurt appeared in 1883 for the 400th-anniversary celebrations of Luther’s birth, but Luther in Worms was performed across Germany that year, before drifting out of fashion. If indeed Meinardus had ever been in fashion – the Berlin Singakademie overlooked his work while performing and commissioning tens of others in similar vein.

Much of the foregoing is drawn from the fourth volume (2012) of A History of the Oratorio, Howard E Smither’s magisterial survey in which Meinardus elicits two passing comments. This first recording of Luther in Worms deserves better than that. Its harmony may be half a century out of date, the nationalist undertow dubious to modern taste and neo-Handelian style even more so, but like its subject the piece stands up for itself. In a break from the composer’s previous treatment of Solomon (1866) and St Paul (1857), Luther in Worms works against the grain of oratorio conventions – exemplified then and now by Haydn’s Creation – which strive for epic contemplation, restrict themselves to Biblical subjects and avoid developed character-identification. Here are no anonymous arias and summatory quartets, but substantial parts for Luther (bass-baritone); his friendly nun and later wife Katherina (soprano); knightly supporters; and the Emperor Charles V (high tenor) and his henchman Glapio (bass), who pronounce heresy on Luther before everyone else sings the ‘Ein feste Burg’ chorale which has acted throughout as one of several authentically Lutheran leitmotivic threads. The would-be high-flown text does not suggest that its author, one Wilhelm Rossmann, deserves to be rescued from obscurity any more than does HA Acworth, librettist for Elgar in King Olaf and Caractacus.

Both of its parts move with clunky transitions through recitative and arioso to arrive at extended finales. Luther’s famous (if apocryphal) cry of ‘Here I stand: I cannot do otherwise’ is saved for the crucial confrontation between preacher and emperor, which Meinardus pitches between the exchanges of Christ and Pilate in the St John Passion and the banter of Sachs and Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger. Sparring choruses between Luther’s adherents and their Catholic opponents have clear Mendelssohnian echoes of the conflict between Baal and the followers of Elijah. Meinardus keeps horns and bassoons busy with orchestration on the border of original and odd, plainly developed from a study of Schumann, who had given guarded encouragement to the 19-year-old would-be composer. This is delineated strongly by this period-instrument studio recording, which otherwise does well by the piece.

All the solo and choral voices are young and keen, sometimes compensating for lack of resonance with tremulous overstatement, though I was taken with the penetrating contralto of Annette Gutjahr and the tenor Corby Welch, who declaims Luther’s sentence with persuasively imperial force. ‘Sexless opera-embryos’: thus spake Wagner of oratorios in 1849. Luther in Worms is unlikely to have changed his mind, or to lead to a flood of Meinardus recordings, but it’s a stirring curio.