Black magic vies with sanctity in Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821), the cornerstone of Romantic opera. To mark the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death, Leon Botstein presents the score as adapted by the arch Romantic Hector Berlioz for the Paris Opera in 1841. A better man for the job would be hard to imagine. For Berlioz, instrumental color was not an embellishment of music but a cornerstone of its structures; he composed not at the piano, as most composers do, but directly into full score. The French premiere of Der Freischütz, in 1824 had impressed him deeply; without the ayahuasca terrors of Weber’s Wolf Glen Scene, who knows if he would ever have dreamt up his Symphonie Fantastique? The Berlioz reboot of Der Freischütz came a decade after that milestone spectacular. Conforming to French taste, Berlioz set spoken dialogue to music. Bowing to the requirement for a dance interlude, he interpolated Weber’s rapturous piano fantasia Invitation to the Dance, freshly swathed in symphonic color (this is the version Nijinsky choreographed as Le Spectre de la Rose). The stylish tenor Freddie Ballentine, familiar to New York audiences as the snaky Sportin’ Life in the Metropolitan Opera’s Porgy and Bess, sings Max, the marksman who suddenly can’t shoot straight. That’s a problem, because his marriage to the boss’s daughter Agathe (Nicole Chevalier) is contingent on a now-or-never bull’s-eye. Alfred Walker is Gaspar, the blackguard who has sold his soul for magic bullets and now hopes to cheat the Devil by reeling in another customer. Cadie Bryan is Agathe’s vivacious cousin, here known as Annette. —Matthew Gurewitsch