It is perhaps inevitable that our era should witness the confluence between cinema – the grand spectacular art form of the twentieth century – and opera, its seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century predecessor. Signs of this confluence are everywhere. In phenomena such as the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, opera is (so to speak) absorbed into film. But productions such as the 2007/2009 Valencia Ring cycle invert this relationship: using digital projections so extensively that film is absorbed into opera. Hunter’s Bride – Jens Neubert’s film version of Der Freischütz – is yet another manifestation of this confluence. Neubert’s work is not simply a highly effective retelling of Weber’s opera; it is a wholehearted embrace of film/opera hybridity. Although it is a work of intense and even breath-taking beauty, it also contains many weak moments. And yet even its failures are fascinating and provocative.

In an interview included in the accompanying booklet, Neubert says that his aim with the Hunter’s Bride was ‘to create a whole new genre – the film opera’. Representing Hunter’s Bride as a whole new genre is clearly an overstatement. Hunter’s Bride belongs to a strong tradition of operatic filmmaking that includes movies such as Joseph Losey’s famous Don Giovanni film of 1979, the 1992 Peter Weigl film of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and Francesco Rosi’s 1984 film of Carmen starring Plácido Domingo and Julia Migenes-Johnson. Like these other films, Hunter’s Bride makes no reference to stage or opera house, but rather reconstructs the diegesis of the opera in purely cinematic terms. The novelty of the Hunter’s Bride lies not with the genre of ‘film opera’ per se, but rather with the ways in which Neubert reimagines his source material. In his original libretto for Der Freischütz, Friedrich Kind locates the action in the Bohemian Forest during the seventeenth century. Neubert transposes his drama to the period (approximately) and the place in which Weber composed the opera: Dresden in the final years of the Napoleonic Wars. In this version, Max is a bedraggled veteran, trying unsuccessfully to reintegrate himself into society. Caspar is also a soldier, and his unrequited love for Agathe is accentuated rather more than it is in the original libretto. Napoleon himself even appears – although only filmed from behind – in a few of the shots, while Prince Ottokar resembles Friedrich Augustus, the King of Saxony during the Napoleonic Wars.

Although Neubert retained all of Weber’s music intact, this transposition of the action necessitated an extensive rewriting of the dialogues that come between the musical numbers. The new script – or should I say ‘screenplay’ – is a substantial improvement on Kind’s original work. In Neubert’s film, the devil is almost completely internalized: Samiel never appears as a character on the screen, and his dialogue in the Act II Finale is a distorted whisper that seems to come from Caspar himself and not from any external entity. The film does not eschew the supernatural, but rather frames it as a reaction to the dislocation of war and the horror of death. Updating the setting of Der Freischütz also provides the drama with a specific and richly textured backdrop, enriched with countless historical details. In the stunning cinematography for the Overture, for instance, a wagon carrying the members of Joseph Seconda’s theatrical troop winds through a mist-shrouded battlefield. Seconda’s group did in fact visit Dresden precisely during this time, and the cinematography seems almost to be based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s famous description of the Battle of Dresden (one of Napoleon’s last victories) that was fought in August of 1813. The iconic Frauenkirche appears in several shots, and the Wolf’s Glen scene is filmed among the strange wind-carved rock formations of the Sächsische Schweiz that lie to the southeast of the city. The great romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich – a contemporary of Weber’s – painted these same formations, and the visual aspects of the film often quote from and reference Friedrich’s fascinating oeuvre. In place of the stereotypical forest village in which Kind set his original libretto, in other words, Neubert offers a complex and nuanced cinematic world.

Neubert creates this world not only through beautiful and highly refined camera work, but also by sophisticated sound design. The London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Daniel Harding sounds absolutely stunning; the brass in particular have a resonant presence that helps the interpretation of Weber’s music in Hunter’s Bride to compare favourably with that captured on any of the other famous recordings of the score. The radiant texture of the LSO seems to have become the archetypal symphonic signature for epic film, and the orchestral sound that they create in Hunter’s Bride reminds one strongly of the work that they did for The Lord of the Rings films and similar movies. The sophisticated sound design for Hunter’s Bride also strongly recalls the cinematic techniques of epic fantasy film. From the very first number – in which battle cries and gunfire are mixed together with Weber’s Overture – to the third-act Finale, music and diegetic sound are freely intermingled. The recording of the voices, moreover, emulates the sound qualities of film rather than those of the operatic stage. Not everyone will approve of the close miking and the high degree of reverberation that recording engineer Joel Iwataki uses to capture the singers, but his techniques give the voices a sense of intimacy and transparency that they sometimes lack in more conventional renditions of the opera. In certain instances, moreover, Iwataki seems able to create aural effects that are only hinted at in Weber’s original score. At the end of the ‘Victoria’ chorus in the first act, for example, the sounds of the celebrating villagers fade as Max moves inside a barn. The sound design elegantly refocuses our attention on his inner life. Weber creates a similar change of focus immediately before Max’s aria, by gradually reducing the preceding waltz until it is nothing but a few isolated notes. We might say that Weber’s gesture is cinematic avant la lettre, and with due respect for the dangers of the intentional fallacy, it seems that Neubert and/or his sound designer is penetrating to the heart of the drama in a particularly powerful way. A similar moment comes in the Wolf’s Glen scene, in which Max’s hallucinations are primarily aural and not visual. Some viewers might object to the ample use of hyper-amplification and metadiegetic sound, but to this reviewer’s ears, the sound design feels like an extension of Weber’s score, rather than an attempt to obscure it.

Although this project was clearly dear to Neubert’s heart, not all of his directorial choices in Hunter’s Bride are equally successful. The slow section of Max’s aria (‘Durch die Auen’) for example, is clearly what in cinematic terms we should call a flashback, and it seems to call for some kind of reference to this convention. Yet Neubert has Max deliver this section of his aria slumped over by a courtyard door. Most of ‘Leise. Leise, fromme Weise’ – to cite another example – is sung not by Agathe herself, but rather by a kind of ka or spiritual emanation of the heroine, dressed in a white nightgown but inexplicably sprouting a pair of devilish horns from her head. And although Neubert assembled an impressive cast for this performance, some of the vocal performances – most notably Michael König’s Max and Benno Schollum’s Kuno – are not as strong as one could wish. But these weak moments do not significantly detract from the success of the film, and they are more than counterbalanced by many pleasant surprises. The young Regula Mühlemann as Ännchen is a real delight to hear, and she gives the role more significance than it typically has. As the Hermit, René Pape is gloriously majestic – the very embodiment of moral authority and cinematic gravitas.

By calling the film Hunter’s Bride rather than Der Freischütz, Norbert is not simply alluding to one of Weber’s working titles for the opera (‘Die Jägersbraut’), but also not so subtly shifting attention away from the tenor and onto the soprano. Juliane Banse sings Agathe beautifully, and she is a compelling screen presence. By placing the action against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, however, Neubert (perhaps inadvertently) helps to centre the drama not on Agathe, but rather on the character of Caspar. Just as with Max, Neubert reimagines Caspar as a soldier attempting to cope with the horrors of war. But in the shift from hunter to Napoleonic soldier, the villain seems to gain more than the hero. Michael Volle brings more than just a richly resonant bass voice to this role. His Caspar is haunted by inner demons every bit as fearsome as those that plague Max; by the end of the film one feels him to be not only a villain but also a victim. One is tempted to say that the film should not be titled Hunter’s Bride but rather Der verfluchte Soldat – the Accursed Soldier, with the understanding that the title refers to Caspar and not to Max.

A shifting sense of the relative importance of different principal roles, of course, is a vital part of the performance history of any opera, and it is my hope that this change, along with all of the other ways in which Norbert’s film departs from the original text, will be seen as strengths rather than weaknesses. In visual, dramatic and musical terms, Hunter’s Bride is a beautiful reimagination of Weber’s opera. It is a magnificent addition to the growing body of works exploring the boundaries between opera and film: a work that honours the past in the best way possible, namely, by using it to create something new.