Master Bell-founder Balthasar Hofer, his wife Anna, their daughter Beate and his journeyman Svetelenz live in a house rebuilt after its destruction by the Ottomans in 1683.

After trying unsuccessfully to burn Arno alive with molten metal, they send him out of the house with Beate to fetch wine while they dig out the treasure.

In 2002, DeutschlandRadio Berlin collaborated with the Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, conducted by Frank Strobel, to produce a record of "this extremely rare and totally unknown symphonic work".

It brings to mind the work of Kurt Weill and Stefan Wolpe, and foreshadows Max Steiner's modernist film scores, adopting expressionist atonal twelve tone leitmotifs.

[3] Lotte H. Eisner criticised what he considered a certain stylistic inconsistency and analysed Pabst's debut film in detail: "Here Pabst still exemplifies the German directors' delight in the Expressionist ornamental style: the bell founder's wife, who comes along hurriedly, carries an immense tray close under her head, her upper body disappears; with her puffy skirts she almost looks like one of those bulbous bells her husband is casting.

And a pillar rises above the marital bed like a tree trunk, its ribs spreading out like branches - Pabst lets the camera linger for a long time in such shots.

"[4] The Lexikon des internationalen Films wrote: "A long underrated melodrama by G. W. Pabst, which in its restored version, recorded with the original music, impresses with its ambitious artistic standards.

"[5] while CineGraph found, "The dull, medieval fable, realised in an expressionist style in its decoration (Röhrig/Herlth) and cast (Steinbrück/Krauß), already echoes the motif of the intertwining of sex, money and power, which Pabst would take up again and again in his best films.