Simplicius Simplicissimus, Karl Amadeus Hartmann's only opera, is one of the neglected masterpieces of 20th-century music. Completed in 1935, it was not performed until after the second world war when Hartmann had ended his self-imposed withdrawal from German musical life in protest against the Third Reich. To those who knew about Hartmann's opera in the early 1930s, the significance of his choice of subject matter - Hans Grimmelshausen's 17th-century picaresque romance about a simpleton caught up in the devastation of the thirty years war - would have been impossible to mistake, while the likelihood of the work ever being staged in Nazi Germany was vanishingly small. Simplicius is an everyman figure who is surrounded by human monsters representing every kind of depravity in a militarised world; Hartmann's score, basically neoclassical but quoting extensively from Lutheran chorales just to underline the target of his satire, never flinches from the horror that regularly surrounds the central character.

This Stuttgart production by Christof Nel updates the action to the present day, but is generally restrained enough to leave the music and the message of the work to make their own points, while the mezzo Claudia Mahnke is quite remarkable in the title role.