Treason, desire and murder – served on a silver platter of glorious Romantic music from 1894 in this world-premiere recording of a stirring opera about the murderous plot against Kleopatra, fabled Queen of the Nile. Beautiful melodies, alluring harmonies and tense leitmotifs, all expertly put to use by probably the most celebrated Danish opera composer of his time, August Enna.

Nowadays Danish composer August Enna (1859 -1939) is almost unknown. At the turn of the last century, things looked quite different for Enna. Without comparison, he was the best best-known Danish composer outside Denmark, praised for his operas, his flair for drama and his skills. But Enna wrote in a hyper-romantic style, that you would have to be Richard Strauss to get away with in the 20th century. When Enna died in 1939, his music was forgotten, both at home and abroad abroad.

The opera Kleopatra, about the famous Egyptian Queen Cleopatra, became one of Enna’s greatest successes. From 1895 to 1897, the opera was performed 20 times at The Royal Theatre and with huge success in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Breslau, Riga, Zürich, Antwerp, Rotterdam, and The Hague; in 1897 alone, the opera reached 50 performances at the opera house in Amsterdam.

Not until the German artistic director Philipp Kochheim put Kleopatra on the repertoire of the Danish National Opera in 2019 as a part of the Danish Series of forgotten operas was it again possible to hear the opera in the composer’s native country – for the first time in 124 years years.

The libretto in Danish is by Einar Christiansen after the novel by H. Rider Haggard, and tells the story of Prince Harmaki, who manages to gain access to Queen Cleopatra’s palace to murder her. He aims to regain power over Egypt and free his country from the bonds of Roman rule.