ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s rarely heard opera “Das Wunder der Heliane” is an artifact from a high period of Viennese style: Specifically, the 1920s.

This was a time made vivid by experimental, yet still crowd-pleasing, harmonies, as well as salacious themes that — in a post-Freudian atmosphere — could also lay a claim to seriousness. Those touches were all present in the extremely belated American premiere of “Das Wunder der Heliane” on Friday at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts here.

And yet there was another era’s musical style stepping into the light for a close-up.

The scoring for one early scene in “Heliane,” between a condemned man and a jailer, at first leans appropriately hard on the strings. Bursts of col legno announce political gravity — and suggest the prisoner’s need for a savior, which the title character of Heliane will become — before giving way to brooding lines. But unexpected jolts ring out: Harps ascend quickly, breaking free of tutti passages that have submerged the sound world in sadness; a mystical celesta accompanies the ambiguous moment when the man’s chains are loosened.

Played brightly and adroitly by the American Symphony Orchestra and conducted by its music director, Leon Botstein, these rapid changes of color didn’t seem like embers of dying Romanticism so much as the first stirrings of the Hollywood epic.