Imagine a musical version of Gustav Klimt's art, lush, sensuous, a swirl of rich textures and finishes, and you'll have some idea of Franz Schreker's 1915 opera Die Gezeichneten (The Marked Ones).

Schreker A- Die Gezeichneten Brubaker, Schwanewilms, Volle, Hale, Nagano, Vienna Opera Chorus, German Symphony Orchestra Berlin (EuroArts DVD)

The opera had quite a tour of major European opera houses, but by the early 1930s, the Austrian composer's partly Jewish heritage and decadent operas had doomed him in Nazi-ruled lands. Performances were canceled, and Schreker was banished from academia; his operas disappeared from the repertory.

But Nikolaus Lehnhoff's surrealist staging of Die Gezeichneten was a hit at the 2005 Salzburg Festival. Now we have it on a spectacularly produced DVD, in high-resolution video and audio. One wishes only for a more complete printed or video synopsis.

Nominally set in 16th-century Italy, to Schreker's own libretto, Die Gezeichneten is the story of a rich but disfigured man and his tragically foiled quest for love. Having created an island Elysium of natural and man-made beauties, Alviano Salvago plans to donate it to the people of Genoa. But this alarms a group of nobles who've turned a grotto on the island into a sex club for deflowering young women. Salvago gets accused, wrongly, of being its ringleader.

Meanwhile, Salvago has attracted the attentions of the mayor's daughter, Carlotta Nardi, a painter. But as soon as she paints Salvago's portrait, the unstable Carlotta loses interest, and she's swept off her feet by the handsome but amoral Count Vitelozzo Tamare. She literally dies of sex, but not before rejecting Salvago as "a troll," at which point the hapless protagonist comes unhinged.

The orchestral writing is unremittingly gorgeous, glowing and glistening; imagine a luxurious mix of Debussy, Dukas, Strauss and maybe a bit of Puccini. Listeners familiar with Erich Wolfgang Korngold's similarly luxurious (if more densely textured) Die tote Stadt won't be surprised that the two operas are near contemporaries. Vocal writing favors free-flowing arioso over set-piece arias.

The stage of Salzburg's Felsenreitschule is covered by a huge, recumbent and crumbling statue of a woman, over and into which the cast clambers. (The designer is Raimund Bauer; the stunning lighting is by Alexander Koppelmann.) Costumer Andrea Schmidt-Futterer favors a kind of sci-fi version of Italian renaissance attire; the last act is turned into a surrealist masked ball a la Max Ernst.

Salvago is supposed to be a crippled humpback, but American tenor Robert Brubaker (Laca in the Dallas Opera's 2004 Jenufa) portrays him as a cross-dresser. (Well, all right.) Mr. Brubaker's dense, incandescent tone and emotional intensity are perfect. Anne Schwanewilms (Leonore in Dallas' 2002 Fidelio) aptly incarnates Carlotta's strange allure, although her singing sometimes is a bit matter-of-fact. Michael Volle is an aptly feral Tamare with a gorgeous baritone. Robert Hale is appropriately sinister as Adorno, the duke who falsely accuses Salvago. Kent Nagano gets glorious playing from Berlin's German Symphony Orchestra.