A troubled marksman, desperate to secure love and status, turns to forbidden magic in a rural community ruled by superstition and ritual. This stark television adaptation strips Weber’s Romantic opera of spectacle, recasting it as a bleak folk-horror parable about fear, failure, and the cost of choosing certainty over conscience.

Handel's Alcina. Anonymous libretto, adapted from the libretto of Riccardo Broschi's "L'isola d'Alcina", based on Ludovico Ariosto's "Orlando furioso" (uncredited)

Nancy Shade is persuasive as the awkward adolescent Marie, whose naiveté leads relentlessly to her downfall. Michael Ebbecke is sympathetic as Stolzius, her jilted lover and avenger, while William Cochran is properly brutish as Desportes, the officer who initiates her spiral of decline. Bernhard Kontarsky gets a dedicated response from his Stuttgart Opera forces, who perform with belief in this often excessive but always engrossing work. Recorded at the Staatsoper Stuttgart, 1989.