First performed in 1821, Weber’s Der Freischütz was a milestone in the development of opera in the 19th century, a score whose evocation of the archetypal forest of the Romantic imagination and its world of magic and superstition would influence generations of composers in Germany and beyond. But what we now know of the work, and what we usually see in the opera house, are not quite what Weber and his librettist, Johann Friedrich Kind, initially envisaged.
In the original text, the overture is followed by a scene between Agathe and the mysterious Hermit, in which she tells him of her fiance Max and is given a bunch of consecrated flowers that will protect her. Dramatically it’s a significant scene, and gives much more sense to the Hermit’s sudden appearance at the end of the opera, which usually seems a bit contrived; the work begins and ends with him. But to Kind’s dismay, Weber’s wife prevailed upon the composer to drop the encounter altogether, and to replace another number later in the opera with a spoken monologue. Weber later regretted his decision, and made sure that what he called the “prologue” was restored to printed versions of the libretto.
Some stage productions of Freischütz now remedy the omission by including the scene as spoken dialogue, but for this recording René Jacobs, never a conductor to do things by halves, has gone one step further. In creating what he calls his Hörspiel (radio play) version of the opera, he sets Kind’s missing text to music from elsewhere in the score, including the overture, and brings in a drinking song by Schubert as a replacement for the later missing aria.
The musical copying and pasting works well enough, and Jacobs’ performance is never short on energy and atmosphere, with the period instruments of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, especially the natural horns, adding a nice edge of menace to the sound world. As that rare thing nowadays, a studio-made opera recording, Jacobs creates a very plausible piece of audio drama, though there’s sometimes the feeling that the soloists have been chosen as much for their ability to deliver the speech as for their singing; the dialogues certainly sound more natural, less arch, than they often do in Singspiel performances, but the musical performances – led by Maximilian Schmitt as Max, Polina Pasztircsák as Agathe, Yannick Debus as Kilian, and Christian Immler in the larger-than-usual role of the Hermit – do sometimes seem a little bland, when compared with other versions on disc. In a significant way, though, Jacob’s recording is really sui generis.
