Here’s a thing. Just a year before Donizetti scored one of his earliest and most enduring hits with L’Elisir d’amore, Auber got there first with Le Philtre. And what do you know? The Frenchman’s Beaujolais is as drinkable as the Italian’s Chianti.

Back in the early 1830s, Auber’s chief rival was not Donizetti but Rossini, whose recent forays into French opera were the talk of the town. Le Philtre – Auber’s follow up to his box-office blockbuster La Muette de Portici (1828) and the equally admired Fra Diavolo (1830) – came hot on the heels of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829), though in manner it’s closer to Le Comte Ory (1828). With a libretto by the great Eugène Scribe, Le Philtre premiered in 1831 helmed by superstar singers Adolphe Nourrit as Guillaume (Donizetti’s Nemorino) and Julie Dorus-Gras as Térézine (who becomes the Italian Adina). Felice Romani based L’Elisir d’amore on Scribe’s...