After his eighth pint of beer, Mr Broucek awakes to find himself on the moon. The next night, a similar feat of imbibing finds him back in the year 1420. Janácek’s inebriated antihero seldom finds his way on to the opera stages of today. As the Frankfurt Opera’s welcome new staging shows, this is not the fault of the music.

When so many other Janácek operas have entered mainstream repertoire, why does The Excursions of Mr Broucek remain such a rarity? Perhaps because the text, on which the composer worked laboriously with no fewer than eight librettists over nine years, is so utterly obscure. The Svatopluk Cech novel on which the opera is based sends up the cultural, political and artistic debates of turn-of-the-century Prague. Its waspish satire is condensed with oblique surrealism in a libretto based more on association than narrative drive, and it is manifestly difficult to make the humour work today.