Content warning: this Freischütz contains entirely rewritten dialogue, added music, cut music, an additional character, reorderings and general scenes of a freely adapted nature. Some might want to look away now. But for those willing to embrace Philipp Stölzl’s rethinking of Weber’s hit opera, filmed on the spectacular floating stage at 2024’s Bregenzer Festspiele, there’s devilish fun to be had.

The Austrian director has sought creatively to bring the work to life for a modern audience, not just through theatrical wizardry – and there’s plenty of that, given Bregenz’s unprecedented budgets – but through an intelligent acknowledgement of elements of the work that can surely, even to its staunchest admirers, feel a bit creaky in the theatre.

With help from new dialogue by Jan Dvořák, the opera’s central relationships are made to feel real and complex: we feel the desperation that forces Max – here recast as a ‘scribe’ – to seek supernatural help for a shooting competition he’s bound to lose; while Agathe and Aennchen are imbued with a sense of agency that, for this day and age, are uncomfortably missing in the original. The spectacular wintry set (designed by Stölzl) is a half-ruined village still reeling from the brutality of the Thirty Years War, half sunken into the waters of the lake. Martial law is still in effect; crime, as we see immediately in a Prologue, is met with swift, brutal punishment.

The biggest change comes in the expansion of the speaking role of Samiel, confined in Weber’s original to the Wolf’s Glen scene, into a full-blown Faustian figure, played with lip-smacking relish by actor Moritz von Treuenfels. This Samiel is a cynical puppet master and emcee, whose commentary (delivered against the eerie sound of a trio of harpsichord, double bass and accordion) and comments (whispered into the unhearing ears of the cast) accompany us through the evening.

He’s given some terrific set pieces and ends up riding the head of a giant fire-breathing serpent at the climax of a zombie-filled Wolf’s Glen scene. At the close, he presents the grimly tragic conclusion of his morality play, before grudgingly giving in to provide the happy end of Weber’s original – where, perhaps inevitably, Stölzl’s inspiration flags a little, one final twist notwithstanding.

It’s not all about the director, though, and thankfully the festival has assembled a superb cast, who live and breathe his concept with full commitment. Mauro Peter’s Max is unusually sensitive and lyrical, while the striking purity of Nikola Hillebrand’s Agathe is all the more given the darkness that surrounds her. Katharina Ruckgaber’s Aennchen – her first aria kitschified with additional instrumentation and synchronised swimmers, her second left out altogether – is recast as fiercely independent, her relationship with Agathe ratcheted up to full-blown infatuation.

With Maximilian Krummen’s trigger-happy Kilian, Franz Hawlata’s bumbling Cuno, Christof Fischesser’s properly sinister Caspar, Liviu Holender’s preening-prince Ottakar and Andreas Wolf’s beautifully sung Hermit (a voice to watch), the cast has real strength in depth. The chorus work and orchestral playing under Enrique Mazzola are lively and engaged.

Definitively not a Freischütz for purists, then, but anyone after a fresh, entertaining and intelligent take on Weber’s work should seek it out.