The special appeal to 20th-century opera composers of early 19th-century texts by Georg Büchner was famously established by Alban Berg, whose Wozzeck (1914 22, first performed 1924) appeared in close proximity to another operatic Wozzeck, by Manfred Gurlitt (1920). The expressionistic fragmentation of the Wozzeck text was a particular attraction for composers seeking librettos projecting naturalistic intensity without shunning all signs of pathos and finer feelings. But Büchner was a dramatist, a writer of poetry and prose, not a librettist, hence the description of Michael Fröhling’s text for Wolfgang Rihm’s chamber opera as ‘freely adapted’ from Büchner’s ‘Lenz-novelle’, and the parallels with Wozzeck, with a central, inherently unstable protagonist whose various encounters drive him into disorientation and dementia, are inescapable.

Composed in Rihm’s mid-20s in 1977 78 and first performed in Hamburg the following year, Jakob Lenz leaps into action as a bold explosion of youthful extravagance, while nevertheless calming down sufficiently in its later stages to make room for more expansive, even reflective episodes. Of earlier recordings, it might be thought that the DVD of the 2019 La Monnaie production, conducted like this new recording by Franck Ollu, was a sufficiently successful realisation of the work as a staged and highly active drama to make any audio-only recording redundant. Yet opting for a presentation that completely shuns the ancillary noises as well as the vocal stresses and strains inevitable in what the Mannheim production photographs included in the booklet show to be another no-holds-barred affair ensures that musical, compositional essentials emerge in a very different way, and a way amply justified by the remarkable qualities of what can be heard – even though nothing can be seen.

Far from offering perfunctory salutes to outmoded operatic traditions, Jakob Lenz combines a wealth of allusions to earlier styles with a radical new look at how music drama could go beyond quasi-Faustian themes. In contrast to a range of precedents from Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman to Busoni’s Doktor Faust, Jakob Lenz owes more to the starkly unredemptive aura of tragedies in the tradition of Shakespeare’s King Lear that end with dark descents into madness and death. And while affinities with such Austro-German precursors as Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu had been resourcefully renewed after 1945 by, among others, Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Aribert Reimann, Rihm offered his own ebulliently diverse perspectives on the most startling avant-garde innovators of the mid-1970s, notably Luigi Nono, whose first two operas, Intolleranza and Al gran sole carico d’amore, the youthful Rihm would surely have encountered and admired.

Perhaps Ollu’s experience with the Amsterdam staging of Jakob Lenz led to the decision that recording the 2021 22 Mannheim staging should offer a very different experience. Certainly, the acoustic character of what has been issued seems to have less to do with the noisy rough and tumble inevitable in actual staged performances than with the fixed focus of studio-style sessions (in January and February 2022). If I am right about this, I can see every justification for an audio-only version that makes it possible for the listener to register the remarkable qualities of the music, as well as the skill and effectiveness of the individual members of the vocal team when they can concentrate on the challenging score rather than the physically demanding staging.

For Joachim Goltz in the title-role, there are appealingly youthful shades to his singing which (the photographs suggest) would perhaps be less apparent when he was acting as the production required. But this is really a work for a relatively small, closely knit ensemble of singers and players – ‘music theatre’ rather than ‘chamber opera’ – whose collective strengths grow ever clearer in the later stages. As for Rihm himself – and it is difficult to write objectively about his work now, so close to his death – there is so much that is imaginative and challenging yet supremely effective about this early work. I have to admit to not being entirely convinced that the more expansive later stages manage to retain the startling punchiness and expressive weight of what comes earlier. But with a very resonant sound picture that nevertheless provides maximum verbal as well as musical clarity, it is evident that Ollu has complete command of a score requiring unfailing precision; and that precision is coupled with an abiding sense of how to sustain moods and materials for their musical and not merely dramatic functions, a feature which is the bedrock against which Rihm’s youthful tour de force can be heard to best effect.