Performed in an English translation, it opened last night in a rare British staging of that work, or any other Lortzing opera, be it Zar und Zimmermann, Undine, Der Waffenschmied, or Wildschütz, the four most regularly encountered of his comedic, folkloristic operas. In Germany, they're everywhere and have been since they first saw the light of day in the first half of the 19th century.

Tuneful, melodic with a general feel-good factor and respectable dramatic storylines – Lortzing was his own librettist – therefore the scarcity of peformances elsewhere is baffling.

The Poacher (Wildschütz), just about the most popular, was premiered in 1842 and, like Lortzing's other operas, is a spieloper or singspiel: ie, the musical numbers are linked with spoken dialogue.

Not an overly huge amount of it in The Poacher, a gentle contemporary satire, and very much an ensemble piece, with duets, trios, quartets, quintets and choruses but only three arias as such.

When Baculus, an ageing village schoolmaster, shoots a deer on the land of the local count it sets in motion a comic web of misunderstandings involving disguises and romantic rivalry over a game of billiards.

James Rutherford, a popular Buxton regular, plays the Poacher in the festival production by Patrick Mason, who has also provided the English translation It is conducted by Andrew Greenwood, who fell in love with opera when he conducted it in Germany in the mid-1990s.

A very strong cast also includes one the country's most popular sopranos Judith Howarth as the Baroness, Gretchen is Laura Parfitt, ETO's hugely impressive cover Anne Boleyn at the Lyceum in March, and Irish mezzo Imelda Drumm is the Countess.

Stephen Loges, an excellent German baritone (remember Music in the Round's Century Songs in 2000?), plays the Count and Benjamin Hullet, a much-praised young English tenor, particularly in Germany, is the Baron.

Another in-house Buxton Festival opera production this year is a triple bill of English one-act operas, Savitri and The Wandering Scholar by Holst, plus Riders to the Sea by Vaughan Williams.

All three are neglected everywhere, including the UK, unfairly because two of them, at least, qualify as minor masterpieces in operatic terms, the Vaughan Williams and Holst's Savitri.

Both composers have a handful of operas each to their name, Holst a couple of handfuls if earlier grandiose Wagnerian efforts had been published.



He had completely changed course in 1908 when he wrote Savitri, a straightforward tale of a young wife winning a debate with Death who has come to claim her husband, based on an episode in a Sanskrit epic.

A fraction over 30 minutes long, with three characters, an orchestra of 12 and a wordless offstage chorus (foreshadowing the one in The Planets a few years later), it is a marvellous example of not having to be big and ostentatious to be beautiful and emotional.

Vaughan Williams achieved much the same thing in what many regard as his finest operatic work, Riders to the Sea, except in this there is a brooding atmosphere of tragedy among what's left of a fishing family on the west coast of Ireland.