Composed in 1823, when Vienna was in the grip of a Rossini craze, Schubert’s last completed opera remained unperformed in his lifetime and dealt a final blow to his hopes of fame and fortune in the theatre. Josef Kupelwieser’s clunky libretto, set amid the struggles between Charlemagne and the Moors, certainly did him no favours. The characters are pasteboard and the action is propelled, often in spoken dialogue, by ludicrous coincidences and ploys such as a cache of weapons conveniently hidden under the floorboards. Schubert – who never had the chance to see what worked on the stage – sometimes writes music that is too gemütlich for the situation. The opera’s heroic aspirations can be undercut by Singspieljollity, as in the ‘friendship’ duet between the noble Moor Fierrabras and the Christian knight Roland (shades here of Die Zauberflöte). Yet amid occasional longueurs and incongruities are many moments of ravishing Schubertian lyricism, above all the Italianate duet for Florinda and her maid Maragond, and Eginhard’s nocturnal serenade to Emma (Charlemagne’s daughter), which turns magically from minor to major as she responds to his wooing. Elsewhere, some of the ensembles – a rather Mozartian quintet in Act 2, a quartet in Act 3 – and the superb Act 1 finale generate real dramatic tension, hinting at the operatic masterpiece Schubert might have achieved given a first-class libretto.

Peter Stein’s Salzburg Festival production mercifully eschews a modern – and potentially inflammatory – Western-Islamic Konzept and sets Fierrabras more or less in its historical period. Drawing on theatrical techniques of the Biedermeier era, he and designer Ferdinand Wögerbauer use gauze backdrops evocative of old engravings to create a series of attractive tableaux vivants. Stein never falls in to the trap of livening up the many static choral episodes with gratuitous ‘action’. Unpretentious and consistently pleasing on the eye, his staging is a refreshing contrast to so many productions that seek to shock and disconcert with maximum scenic ugliness.

As Stein stresses in an interview on the ‘bonus’ track, the core of the opera lies in the two pairs of star-crossed lovers: Emma and Eginhard, and the Christian knight Roland and Florinda, daughter of the Moorish prince Boland (no librettist worth his salt could have planted a Boland and a Roland in the same opera). All four roles are convincingly taken, with the palm going to Julia Kleiter’s Emma, alluringly voiced and phrased, and soaring without shrillness into the stratosphere. As Florinda, Dorothea Röschmann compensates for some loss of tonal bloom with her trademark histrionic intensity. Her thrillingly fiery Act 2 solo – one of only two true arias in the opera – rightly elicits a storm of applause.

Benjamin Bernheim, a new name to me, fields an ardent, youthful lyric tenor as the unheroic knight Eginhard, while Markus Werba sings Roland’s music with incisive vigour. Fierrabras himself, the Moorish prince who renounces both Emma and his Islamic faith, is portrayed powerfully, if not without strain, by Michael Schade. Peter Kálmán rants and blusters effectively as Boland, whose ‘rage’ aria evokes a Moorish Pizarro; and Georg Zeppenfeld brings a resonant basso cantante and benign dignity to the role of Charlemagne.

A word, too, for the contribution of the Vienna State Opera Chorus, both sonorous and sensitive, with some budding Siegfrieds among the tenors. While Ingo Metzmacher’s conducting may not be as subtly flexible as Abbado’s in his pioneering CD version (DG, 10/90), he evidently believes passionately in Schubert’s score, paces it shrewdly and elicits classy playing from the Vienna Philharmonic. Kupelwieser’s barely competent dramaturgy will always bar Fierrabras from the operatic mainstream. But it is a work of many musical delights, and this vocally strong, visually handsome Salzburg production does it proud.