In her star-spangled boudoir, with only the figures of a lavish rococo fresco for company, the Marschallin puts her fist through her vanity-table mirror. Strauss’s hunting horns blare from the orchestra pit, and the satyrs from the painting come to life. One of them collects the shards of mirror and retreats with them to the side of the stage. While the androgynous Octavian declares his undying love, the Marschallin is spinning her self-destructive plot for his future. By the time Baron Ochs, representative of ungovernable Eros, bursts in, the satyr has fashioned the mirror splinters into a silver rose for Octavian to bring to Sophie.

Lars Woldt (front) and Marina Prudenskaja

So, with a series of poignant connections, Stefan Herheim draws us into his Stuttgart Rosenkavalier. Sophie appears as a younger incarnation of the Marschallin. Ochs is flanked by a horde of randy satyrs, wreaking havoc with their chaotic urge to live out their lusts. The creatures of the Marschallin’s court are half-animals too, driven to their various roles by more basic instincts. But Herheim resists the urge to dissect to excess, falling back again and again on opulent images and simple, clear storytelling.

With this outstanding production, the troubled era of intendant Albrecht Puhlmann, now nearing its end, finally comes of age. The casting is still not as strong as it was in the house’s heyday, but at last Stuttgart has produced a staging worth travelling to see. Herheim, who moved from raising hackles to winning adulation with his 2008 Bayreuth Parsifal, went on to produce some lemons. Now he is clearly back on form.

When finally Sophie and Octavian come together, the Marschallin and Faninal have found their way into boxes and become conservative audience members. The satyr, weeping in despair, eats the broken glass of his homemade rose and dies a bloody death. These final five minutes make sense of the previous four hours. Herheim shows us with awful clarity how Strauss’s move to saccharine nostalgia after the brutality of Elektra is a conscious step back towards deadly conformity. The Marschallin knows that history will repeat itself, and is resigned. The satyr had hoped for more. And we all know, when we look at the trappings of Vienna’s outmoded fin de siècle aristocracy, what unspeakable things were to come.

Manfred Honeck conducts with a raw absence of sentimentality, Marina Prudenskaja is an expressive, creamy-toned, complex Octavian, and Mojca Erdmann’s Sophie has a beautiful, silvery fragility. As the Marschallin, Christiane Iven sounds old enough to have her regrets, but finds increasing refinement as the evening progresses; Lars Woldt’s Ochs offers surprising depths of intimacy and lyricism alongside the more usual boorishness.